Internet portal Yahoo on Thursday unveiled an e-mail service that offers customers expanded storage and new account management features, its latest move to expand its subscription revenue and lessen its reliance on Web advertising. Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo said Yahoo Mail Plus will cost anywhere from $29.99 to $59.99 per year, depending on how much storage the customer wants. The packages range from 25MB to 100MB of storage space.
Mail Plus will allow people to attach more and larger files to their messages, block more addresses to prevent junk or "spam" messages, and set up more filters to direct specific messages to specific folders. The new service will also allow access to Yahoo mail accounts through traditional desktop e-mail programs such as Outlook or Eudora, allow messages to be sent from different e-mail accounts through Yahoo and remove the company"s promotional taglines from messages.
Yahoo has cited paid services such as extra e-mail storage as a key growth area. Such services, which the company has been adding to offset a prolonged slump in advertising, accounted for 41 percent of Yahoo"s revenue in the most-recent quarter. The new, bundled service offered a 33 percent discount over existing separate offerings from Yahoo, said Lisa Pollock, director of messaging products for Yahoo.
"What we"re doing with this package is targeting e-mail users, and not just Yahoo Mail users, who use their e-mail frequently," she said. "It expands our ability to consolidate a number of different accounts through Yahoo Mail."