Undiscovered Yahoo...

I learned something about Yahoo completely by accident today.

My husband - who HATES using a computer - actually got himself an email account. Well, actually a young guy he knows set the account up for him. Tim wanted me to send him a pic of myself (get ya minds out the gutta, folks!) and since he never can access the ones I send to his phone, we decided to try the PC this time.

ANYway... when I got the email address from the guy who set the account up, it was a "Ymail" account. I was like, "What the hell is ymail???"

Ymail is Yahoo's apparent answer to Google's Gmail.

Now, I've been trying to tell you peoples about the beauty, simplicity and mostly-spam-free wonders of Gmail, but y'all are just hard-headed. I don't think one of my friends or family signed up for a Gmail account since I mentioned it. I heard excuses like, "I'm used to my **fill in name here** email account." Or: "I don't want to deal with all the signing-up hassle"... Yeah, yeah, yeah... Whatev...

Well, I guess the folks over at Yahoo were paying attention to the folks like me who LOVE Gmail because they decided to do something similiar-sounding, similiar-looking, and (though it remains to be seen) similar-acting to Gmail. They did start with the biggie that Gmail had going for it: Unlimited storage...

Ta-daaaa!!! We have Ymail.

The deal is, Ymail is Yahoo Mail, except instead of being whoever-ever@yahoo.com, a user would be whoever-ever@ymail.com.

Also, when you do get a Ymail account, you have to sign in with the whole shebang (whoever-ever@ymail.com) instead of just being able to use the whoever-ever user ID like with old Yahoo mail. That's a little tedious if you share a PC or for other reasons have to sign out and back into your email often. (Not so bad for a user who can stay signed in.)

Now, a nice little perk is that when you DO sign up for a Ymail account, you get the options to do something I never noticed with Yahoo mail where you can "Connect" with people you select via your Profile. (As far as I know, with old Yahoo, this was mainly done via Yahoo 360 - which I hate because of the inability to delete page...)

What I like about the connections/profile thingie on Ymail is that you can share (with the folks of your choosing) such things as your presence on the web in various circles: Twitter, Blogger, Picasa etc. For instance, since some of you lazy-assed boogers don't check this blog often enough, you can now see it on my Ymail Connections page (that is, IF you bother to connect!) I like that you can limit who looks at what. You do these little invites or just open up your page to "anybody."

Once I signed up for the Ymail account and "updated" connections, profile, info, etc, I signed back into my old Yahoo email to see that the Ymail changes/functionalities had transferred over. In other words, I was able to do the "connect/update" thingie from my old account also. Interesting (and kinda fun!)

It doesn't stop there. I guess when you sign up for Yahoo now (as a new user or as someone just adding another ID), you have a choice of selecting which of 3 Yahoo domains to use: Yahoo, Ymail, or Rocketmail. **shrug** (I'ma leave Rocketmail alone for now!)

So. My man - in a roundabout, accidental way - led me to something new on the World Wide Web.

Peace
--Free