Yahoo unveils premium, subscription email service
With Yahoo Mail Plus, Yahoo continues its path down subscription services in an effort to convert its millions of free users into revenue generating customers. According to this Dow Jones story in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) Mail Plus will allow users to maintain professional as well as personal relationships via their Yahoo email address:
Yahoo Inc. unveiled a premium paid e-mail service Thursday, marking its latest bid to boost recurring revenue with subscriptions and put some distance between it and competitors like Microsoft Corp.'s Hotmail service.
...Though light users are unlike to give up free e-mail, "it's a great way for Yahoo to make money off of the most loyal users," she said. "The potential for this product, compared to others, is much greater. Not everybody plays games, but everybody uses e-mail."
...Mail Plus puts new mail features together with a la carte premium features and souped-up free ones. For $29.99 a year, users of Yahoo Mail Plus will get 25 megabytes of storage, be allowed to send photo- and media-clip laden messages as big as 10 megabytes and with up to 10 attachments, have POP and forwarding capability, block as many as 200 addresses and use 50 spam filters. POP allows users of Yahoo's service to use e-mail programs like Outlook and to retrieve messages from other e-mail accounts.