Ymail.com goes live

Update: ymail accounts will be 'freed' up starting at noon on the West Coast in the U.S. That's 3pm on the East Coast and who the heck knows elsewhere.

Update2: Find the NEWLY designed page for Rocketmail and YMail addresses at http://new.mail.yahoo.com/addresses.

Ymail.com, a domain that Yahoo Inc. purchased in late 2007, will go live today and is for those who have found out sometime between the 1990s and now that their preferred or favorite email address at Yahoo.com is taken. Starting today, Yahoo is encouraging email lovers to line up at the starting gate for an unprecedented address-landrush for @ymail.com accounts. The best ones apparently will be auctioned, for charity, at Ebay.

When we blogged last December we speculated that Yahoo Inc. bought the domain www.ymail.com - a much unpublicized event in aftermarket domain sales - to provide users with a tap-savings entry point to their email accounts. Since purchasing the ymail.com domain, Yahoo has forwarded it to mail.yahoo.com and we didn't think things would change. We didn't conceive that Yahoo would actually create a new @ymail.com email platform separate from its existing @yahoo.com platform.

Still, whichever email service users choose, Ymail.com is - at best - one tap less than Yahoo.com (the latter URL sends users to a page that is an extra click away from Yahoo Mail). Both are mobile friendly but not tap-friendly mobile URLs.

Can Yahoo do better?

Yes.

The two better choices for Yahoo is to buy 92466.com (yahoo) and 96245.com (ymail) from their respective owners. Those URLs are 6 and 5 taps (w/o the .com) respectively on any mobile device, and require about 50% less tapping than Yahoo's current Ymail and Yahoo URLs.

Links:

Ebay page for auction through June 30

Yahoo Mail blog