TechyLife.com

YAHOO will introduce new features for its popular web-based email program, including software that allows users to send messages directly to someone’s mobile phone.

The enhancements make it easier to send email, instant messages or text messages from a single website – no need to launch or toggle between separate applications or devices. It will take up to six weeks for all the new features to become available to all 254 million Yahoo Mail subscribers in 21 languages worldwide.

The most obvious beneficiaries will be parents, who will be able to use their keyboards to type messages sent to their children’s mobile phones – no thumb-twisting typing on a dial pad, said Yahoo vice-president John Kremer.

“We’re giving you the right way to connect at the right time with the right person,” Mr Kremer, whose two preteen sons vastly prefer text and instant messages to email, said.

The changes come amid fierce competition among providers of free, web-based email services. Yahoo and Microsoft’s Hotmail have long dominated the niche, but Google’s Gmail has grown quickly since its introduction in April 2004.

In February, Yahoo announced it would provide unlimited storage space, and earlier this month Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft said Hotmail would increase free storage from 2 to 5 gigabytes. Time Warner’s AOL, the fourth largest email provider, began offering unlimited storage in the northern summer last year. Google provides nearly 3 gigabytes.

Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo! bills the changes as the most significant overhaul of Yahoo! Mail since its launch in 1997. The new version replaces a one-year-old beta program and adds new features, including text messaging, a more comprehensive email search engine and an easier to read and edit contacts database.

Users who don’t want the upgrades – or whose computers are too slow to handle them – can opt to remain with the current version, which Yahoo! will call Classic.

The new version allows users to click on a contact and then select whether to send that person an email, instant message or text message. You could send an email or instant message if you know the recipient is at the computer – or a text message if the recipient is on the road with a mobile phone.