Yahoo Soups Up E-Mail ServiceYahoo Soups Up E-Mail Service

Trying to lure more customers from the ranks of free-use folks into the paying-customer column, Yahoo Inc. on Thursday introduced Yahoo Mail Plus, a suite of bundled services.

With prices starting at $30 annually, Mail Plus both consolidates Yahoo Mail premium add-ons and includes several new features. Among the former are access to non-Yahoo POP accounts and forwarding, as well as additional message storage space. New features include the ability to send messages with larger (and more) attachments, message archiving to a local drive, and sending messages via Yahoo that appear to come from non-Yahoo domains.

"What is happening is that companies are having to find ways to start charging money" for E-mail services, says analyst David Ferris, president of Ferris Research, a firm that focuses on messaging and collaboration technologies. "They tried advertising, but that's not working, so they need to make money another way. All the major free [E-mail] services are looking for ways to get customers to pay them money."

Both Yahoo and Hotmail, the other leader in Web-based E-mail, have been tightening the screws on freebies by rationing storage space, removing once-free features, and forcing users to log on within set periods. "They're all pulling the noose tighter," Ferris says.

Linda Pollack, Yahoo's director of messaging products, sees it differently. "We're shifting strategies to answer customer needs and to provide a set of services with an excellent value. Customers want a one-stop solution and one point of access to all of their E-mail needs," she says.

Yahoo Mail Plus is a better deal than going a la carte, Pollock says. She points out that the combined cost of 25 Mbytes of storage space, which runs $20 annually, and POP access, priced at $25 per year, is 33% more than the annual $30 of Mail Plus. In addition, she says, "customers get all the other great features, many of which have never been available before."

Yahoo will verify all E-mail addresses through a response mechanism to protect against E-mail identity theft. Mail Plus also ups the number of attachments per message to 10 and lets users mail attachments as large as 10 Mbytes. The free version of Yahoo Mail accepts only three attachments per message, with attachments no larger than 1.5 Mbytes.

Mail Plus is available for $30, $40, or $60 annually for packages that include 25 Mbytes, 50 Mbytes, and 100 Mbytes of message storage space, respectively.

"Yahoo's plan is actually very generous, more so than Hotmail," Ferris says. "And it includes some features that are actually useful for business." In particular, he cites backup archiving to the local desktop and access to Yahoo Mail via an E-mail client. "When you're getting 30 or 50 messages a day [on Yahoo], you want to use Outlook," he says, to grab mail.

Yahoo won't divulge the number of paying subscribers to Yahoo Mail services, but cites 1.5 million service-paying members. And Yahoo Mail, Pollack says, is a key contributor to the premium service bottom line.