Yahoo, owner of the Internet's most popular free e-mail service, is adding features such as the capacity to send 300 photos in a message, seeking to attract users and advertisers in its battle with Google and Microsoft Corp.
Yahoo's picture mail service will be tested in the version of Yahoo Mail that was introduced to customers on Thursday, said Andy Spillane, vice president of Yahoo Mail. The program also adds security features.
Yahoo is trying to attract e-mail customers as it competes with Google's Gmail service, which offers more capacity to store messages. The service is free and is paid for by advertising.
Users of free e-mail tend to visit other parts of Yahoo's site, including news and search, boosting ad revenue, said Martin Pyykkonen, an analyst at Janco Partners.
"Its like that Hotel California song where `once you're in you can never leave.' Yahoo wants people to have a Yahoo mail account because it gets them to do other things on the site," Pyykkonen said.
"The bigger challenge is Gmail, and given that that's free and has a lot of storage, they have to try to be competitive," he said.
Picture mail works by placing small thumbnail versions of the photos in the actual e-mail rather than attaching entire photos to the message, so customers can include more pictures without running into limits that govern how big an e-mail file can be. The full pictures can be viewed by clicking on the thumbnails.
Yahoo also will begin offering its e-mail service in Poland, Turkey, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, Spillane said.
A new security feature alerts customers when Yahoo can't verify that an e-mail has come from the address that appears in the message. Hackers try to entice customers to give up information such as bank account numbers and passwords by pretending the e-mail comes from a customer's bank or credit-card company.
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