Yahoo addresses narrowing email options with ymail and rocketmail

San Francisco: Yahoo is offering free e-mail accounts under two designations in an effort to attract web surfers unhappy with their current addresses.

The company expects to begin registering new addresses under the domains of "ymail" and "rocketmail" at http://mail.yahoo.com.

It will be the first time that Yahoo has offered e-mail accounts under umbrellas other than its own company name since it became a correspondence conduit in 1997.

Yahoo began offering free e-mail shortly after its $80 million acquisition of Four11, which included the rocketmail domain.

Rocketmail users at the time of the acquisition were allowed to keep their existing accounts, but Yahoo hadn't accepted any new addresses under that name until now.

The diversification into new e-mail designations is being driven by the difficulty that people are having as they try to find an appealing e-mail handle under the Yahoo domain.

"We realised we needed to expand the universe of Yahoo mail," said John Kremer, a vice president in charge of Yahoo's e-mail.