YMAIL and Rocketmail - Yahoo's answer to Google and Gmail

For many Internet users, registering their own name as a Web-based e-mail address is next to impossible. Unless they possess a particularly uncommon name, most users settle for an address with a number or nickname.

Today, Yahoo Inc. will roll out two new e-mail services - Rocketmail and Ymail - that the company hopes will start a "global race" among Internet users looking to ditch their high school and gimmicky e-mail addresses and score their desired online handle.

Although e-mail remains the most pervasive form of online communication, analysts say younger generations are now using social networking sites to send messages.

"What we are seeing is that teens increasingly are turning to different forms of communications, such as Facebook and MySpace, to communicate with each other instead of using e-mail," said Jennifer Simpson, a senior online interaction analyst with the Yankee Group in Boston.

In an effort to remain relevant and keep people coming back to their portal sites, Web giants such as Yahoo, Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. are pushing back against their upstart rivals and scrambling to find new ways to integrate their instant messaging and e-mail services to make their sites the first destination users visit online.

E-mail and instant messaging services drive hefty amounts of traffic to the main pages of their parent sites, which increases the value of the advertising real estate on those sites, said Canaccord Adams analyst Colin Gillis.

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Although Yahoo doesn't mine users' e-mails for keywords to provide contextual advertising the way Google's Gmail does, it does deliver targeted advertising based on the personal information users provide when they sign up.

Yahoo Mail is the most popular Web-based e-mail portal in the world, with more than 266 million unique users in April, topping Hotmail's 264 million users and Gmail's 102 million visitors, according to data from Web tracker ComScore Inc.

"The reality is the name space for @yahoo.com is nearly saturated," said Naomi Lipowski, head of communications products for Yahoo Canada.

Canadians wanting a rocketmail.com or ymail.com address can begin signing up at 4 p.m. today through the main Yahoo Mail page.