Yahoo!7 hunts for new mail users

Yahoo!7 has ramped up its email offering in an effort to win over users of rival products such as G-Mail and Hotmail.

The company is offering a free service to allow users of other email services to more easily transfer contacts, calendar contents and archived messages to Yahoo!7.

The service makes use of Esaya’s ‘TrueSwitch’ technology which also enables users to notify their contacts that their email address has changed.

Commenting on the launch, Yahoo!7 acting head of communications, Mark Helvadjian, said the service was a step in a series of improvements the company was seeking to make to Yahoo!7 Mail.

“We obviously hope it will encourage people to trial our product but we’re not looking at it solely as a customer acquisition strategy,” he said. “We know the difficulty of switching email accounts so we’ve introduced a feature that removes that hassle.”

Despite G-mail’s larger free storage capacity and recent opening up to all comers, Helvadjian said Yahoo!7 was only responding to customer feedback.

“This announcement isn’t a response in reaction to anything any other provider has done,” he said. “We know we’ve got a great product in Mail and we’ve got even more improvements and updates coming up.”

More recently Yahoo!7 also announced the integration of instant messaging capabilities within its Web mail.