August 30, 2007

Free Email Services: Now They're Ready for Business, Except for One Thing...

I was reading with much interest Walt Mossberg's review of the new Yahoo Mail. He likes it better than Gmail and Hotmail.

With the nice drag and drop features, tabs and IM integration it's really a high end email tool for advanced communication.

I think that the only thing Yahoo needs to do - is enable business domain names with the Yahoo email interface.

I've been against small businesses have a "free" email as it looks unprofessional having maryjanecookies@aol.com. However, I think AOL and Yahoo should consider letter people integrate their domains with these email front ends - as Google enables with Google apps and email hosting.

Mossberg writes The new Yahoo Mail, which works in Internet Explorer and Firefox on Windows, and in Firefox on the Macintosh, is now more than just an email program. Like Gmail, but unlike Hotmail, it has a built-in instant-messaging module. You can choose to communicate with any of your contacts via a real-time chat, right from within Yahoo Mail, as long as that contact is online and has an IM account on either the Yahoo or Microsoft instant-messaging networks. You don't need to be running your IM program.

There are many services that provide economical email hosting - such as Blue Tie, M18, Office Live and many others. But Yahoo has many businesses that use it's email services. I think it's missing out on an opportunity by not enabling small business email services.

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