Yahoo today is revamping one of its most important products, Yahoo Mail, relaunching the 18-year-old email service with smarter and faster mobile features and encouraging users to dump their passwords.
Unlike CEO Marissa Mayer’s Great Yahoo Mail Makeover of 2013 — an attempt to cull from her experience running Google’s widely popular Gmail that instead confused and infuriated loyal Yahoo users — today’s changes are more subtle and unlikely to jar.
The most dramatic shift, though still optional, is the promise that “Yahoo users will never have to use a password again” thanks to a new form of authentication called Yahoo Account Key, said Dylan Casey, the product manager who developed the new tool.
“We’re going to kill passwords altogether,” he said, as he described a new system that sends push notifications to a user’s smartphone or wristwatch asking to verify identity.
How users will react to the change, designed to be more secure than the outdated password model and simpler than the typical two-factor authentication process, remains to be seen, but the company is taking an eat-your-vegetables approach to combat the security vulnerabilities caused by weak passwords that are easily forgotten, easily hacked and typically shared across multiple personal accounts.
“It takes getting used do,” said Jeff Bonforte, Yahoo’s head of communications products, in a press event Wednesday at Yahoo’s office in downtown San Francisco. “Patterns die hard. People are used to passwords, as much as they hate them.”
Other upgrades include a “multiple mailbox” manager that places separate email accounts under one umbrella tool, allowing Yahoo Mail users to access their emails from AOL or Microsoft’s Hotmail/Outlook.com and giving Yahoo an even larger body of email content to scan for targeted advertising dollars. Gmail is not included in the mix, though ongoing talks with Google could fold it in later, Bonforte said.
Jeff Bonforte, Yahoo’s senior vice president of communications products. (Photo courtesy of Yahoo)
Also launching today on Yahoo Mail are more powerful tools to search for archived content and automatically suggest the right contacts when composing email.
“We think we have the most advanced search in a mobile mail client,” said Fernando Delgado, a senior director of product management. Regular users of Yahoo Mail on mobile devices are going to notice those improvements right away, he said.
Other improvements include a new feature for so-called “me-mailers” — the roughly 20 percent of Yahoo users who frequently send emails to themselves with to-do lists or other notes — that helps them create a notebook of their files. There’s also a feature that adds icons for every verified user — company logos for emails from well-known banks, stores, airlines and other services — and automatically created initials for everyone else.
Yahoo Mail, once the leader in Web-based email providers and a crucial springboard to the company’s other online products, has been playing catch up since Google launched its upstart email service in 2004 and swiftly grew to become the leader, as the latest comScore figures show:
ComScore estimates from August 2015 show Yahoo Mail as No. 2 in unique visitors behind Gmail.
Bonforte said Yahoo has spent tens of millions of dollars on the computing power that allows today’s upgrades to work. The new Yahoo Mail app should already be available in the Apple App Store and will be available starting today for Android users in Google Play.
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