Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

4 Responses to “Go west@ymail.com, young man!”

1. Joseph Says:
   June 19th, 2008 at 2:21 pm

   Any determination yet if accounts can either be merged after creation OR if a new address can be created within an existing account?

2. Sean Says:
   June 19th, 2008 at 2:54 pm

   I’ve been wondering the same thing, Joseph. At the moment, I can’t find this functionality, and Ryan K. posted in a comment on the official blog post that there weren’t any ways to link the two accounts (@yahoo.com vs. @ymail/rocketmail.com) to each other. However, I can’t imagine that they’d neuter their “Add Extra Mail Address” feature to only support @yahoo.com addresses when there doesn’t seem to be any functional difference between those and @ymail or @rocketmail addresses. I’ll file enhancement bugs if it turns out that we’re not going in that direction. :D

   For right now, though, yeah, I’m just squatting new accounts on my desired @ymail and @rocketmail accounts, in the hope that we’ll eventually be able to merge these guys together and I can do a quick “delete account / retrieve email address” swap.

3. Joseph Says:
   June 21st, 2008 at 7:26 pm

   Seanm, Thanks for that update. What is the “Add Extra Mail Address” feature you referenced and where do you enable it? Also, is the “delete account / retrieve email address” an official functionality? Because typically once an address is deleted it takes a long time before a new account can use a previously used address.

4. Sean Says:
   June 23rd, 2008 at 8:11 pm

   The “Add Extra Email Address” feature is accessible, as far as I can tell, by:

   1) Going to your Mail Options.
   2) Selecting “Accounts”. If you’re in the All New Y! Mail, you’ll get bounced back to the old Classic configuration pages.
   3) There should be a section about an “Extra Mail Address”, unless you already have a secondary account set up. With the non-Plus setup, you’re only allowed to have one mail alias, I believe. Provided that you don’t have another mail account (which you would see in the “Mail Accounts” section), then you can add on an alias from within the @yahoo domain.

   As far as I’m aware, there isn’t any official way to clear up an account and then retrieve it immediately — I was generally more imagining that I’d delete my original account and try to re-register it again every few days until it worked. :D But you very may well be right that addresses take a long time to get freed up, in which case I apologize about the misinformation. Even though I work at Yahoo!, as far as Y! Mail goes, I’m pretty much just another user (with a tiny, tiny bit of inside information and the ability to poke around in their bug queue :P).

   Regarding the general idea about merging accounts, Ryan K commented on his blog post that there was not any way to do so at the moment (because they want to make sure new users can get new @ymail or @rocketmail addresses versus existing users clogging up the namespace), but they’re thinking about whether they’ll add it as an option, so we’ll see.

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