Yahoo! to expand e-mail service

By Michael Liedtke
Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO — Hoping to lure more subscribers, Yahoo! Inc. today plans to introduce a souped-up e-mail service that will charge slightly more for added bells and whistles.

Yahoo!'s "Mail Plus" service will cost $29.99 annually and will appeal to users looking for more storage space in their online mailboxes and the flexibility to use multiple e-mail addresses from one domain.

The new service will allow subscribers to consume up to 25 megabytes of storage space — a luxury that currently costs $19.99 annually.

But the expanded e-mail service offers much more than additional storage space. The other features include the ability to forward to other addresses and stronger protections against unsolicited e-mail known as spam.

Yahoo! expects the ability to send messages using other e-mail addresses to be the most popular perquisite.

As an example, a subscriber could set up the Yahoo! account to send mail under the domain name of a business or personal address. Yahoo! said it will verify all e-mail addresses before empowering subscribers to use this feature.

"We think this is an incredibly innovative feature," said Lisa Pollock, Yahoo!'s director of messaging products.

Yahoo! will continue to provide its free e-mail service to users willing to accept more restrictions. Yahoo!'s free e-mail service is the second most popular on the Web, ranking behind Microsoft's Hotmail, said industry analyst David Ferris.

With more Internet users operating multiple e-mail boxes, Yahoo! is counting on the ability to consolidate addresses as a major drawing card.