Go west@ymail.com, young man!
| Thursday, June 19th, 2008 | --Sean |
This one'll be short, in the interest of posting before all the fun starts! We've opened up two new email domains, @ymail.com and @rocketmail.com, so that you can finally grab that email address that you've always been hoping for (because sean@rocketmail.com is easier to remember than xxXSean67723Xxx@yahoo.com). The domains apparently open up somewhere around noon PST today, and as far as I can judge, you need to set them up as new Yahoo! accounts. We'll find out together whether there are any options to merge accounts together or claim addresses from existing @yahoo.com accounts. So, just be sure to roll out around noon and stake your claim on this pristine email frontier before all the good names are taken again. :D
EDIT: Word of warning -- if you get an email address that's TOO popular (ie, sean@ymail.com), do keep in mind that you're opening yourself up to more potential spam, since you'll have an easily dictionary-guessed email address on a popular domain. We have pretty solid spam blocking, but it can only do so much.
EDIT #2: Here's the official signup link: http://new.mail.yahoo.com/addresses
EDIT #3: This, of course, means that you can use either http://ymail.com or http://rocketmail.com as shorthand for http://mail.yahoo.com, which is kind of handy. And, on that subject, does everyone remember that you can type http://ysearch.com instead of going to http://search.yahoo.com? Goooood.
Also, the official Yahoo! Mail blog post on this subject is available here.
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?
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.
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.
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.