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Yahoo to introduce new messenging enhancements to Web e-mail service

Yahoo Inc was scheduled to introduce new features yesterday for its popular Web-based e-mail program, including software that allows computer users to type text messages on a keyboard and send them directly to someone's cellphone.

The enhancements make it easier to send e-mail, instant messages or text messages from a single Web site, with no need to launch or toggle between separate applications or devices.

254 MILLION SUBSCRIBERS

It will take up to six weeks for all the new features to become available to all 254 million Yahoo Mail subscribers in 21 languages worldwide.

The most obvious beneficiaries will be parents, who will be able to use their keyboards to type messages sent to their children's cellphones, with no thumb-twisting typing on a dial pad, Yahoo vice president John Kremer said.

"We're giving you the right way to connect at the right time with right person," said Kremer, whose two preteen sons vastly prefer text and instant messages to e-mail.

FIERCE COMPETITION

The changes come amid fierce competition among providers of free, Web-based e-mail services. Yahoo and Microsoft Corp's Hotmail have long dominated the niche, but Google Inc's Gmail has grown quickly since its introduction in April 2004.

In February, Yahoo announced that it would provide unlimited storage space and earlier this month Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft said Hotmail would increase free storage from 2 to 5 gigabytes.

Time Warner Inc's AOL, the fourth-largest e-mail provider, began offering unlimited storage last summer. Google provides nearly 3 gigabytes.

Sunnyvale-based Yahoo bills the changes as the most significant overhaul of Yahoo Mail since its launch in 1997.

The new version replaces a one-year-old beta program and adds new features, including text messaging, a more comprehensive e-mail search engine and an easier to read and edit contacts database.

Users who do not want the upgrades -- or whose computers are too slow to handle them -- can opt to remain with the current version, which Yahoo will call "Classic."

Message options

The new version allows users to click on a contact and then select whether to send that person an e-mail, instant message or text message. Users can send an e-mail or instant message if you know the recipient is at the computer -- or a text message if the recipient is on the road with a cellphone.

"This gives people the ability to reach anybody in their contact database anytime," said Mike McGuire, vice president of research at industry analysis firm Gartner Inc. "For good or evil, it's going to be much easier for anybody to get a hold of you."
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