Instruct: Given a question, retrieve documents that can help answer the question.
Query: When was Yahoo mail launched?
Yahoo! Mail is an email service launched in 1997 through the American parent company Yahoo!. Yahoo Mail provides four different email plans: three for personal use (Basic, Plus, and Ad Free) and another for businesses.[5][6] By December 2011, Yahoo! Mail had 281 million users, making it the third largest web-based email service in the world.[7] Since 2015 its webmail client also supports managing non-Yahoo e-mail accounts.[8]
Originally Nokia operated a service called Ovi Mail which was used on their S40, Symbian, and MeeGo devices, and was eventually bundled with all Lumia Windows Phone 7 devices, in 2011 Nokia has chosen to migrate Ovi Mail and Ovi Chat accounts to Yahoo! services, at the time Ovi Mail had over 9 million active users. As Yahoo! Mail is built into Windows Phone 7 devices Nokia prompted to its users that they'll have a smooth transition when migrating to Windows Phone. Later Nokia launched Nokia Mail a service powered by Yahoo! accounts for web browsers. 
Jeff Bonforte was a Senior Vice President of Communications Products at Yahoo!, responsible for Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Answers, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Contacts and Yahoo! Calendar. Before that he was Chief executive officer (CEO) of Xobni, a company that Yahoo! bought in July 2013.
Yahoo Mail Classic was announced as to be shut down in April 2013. Yahoo made a notice that, starting in June 2013, Mail Classic and other old versions of Yahoo Mail will be shut down. All users of Mail Classic are expected to switch to the new Yahoo Mail, use IMAP, or switch to another email service. In addition, April 2013 brought the closure of Upcoming, Yahoo Deals, Yahoo SMS Alerts, Yahoo Kids, Yahoo Mail and Messenger feature phone (J2ME).
Yahoo! Mail China officially announced its shutdown on April 18, 2013.[33][34] Users were warned that all emails, contacts, and account settings would be inaccessible, unless users migrated to the American version of Yahoo! Mail. Individuals who made China Yahoo! Mail accounts during the Alibaba takeover were required to create new accounts under new usernames.[35]
When asked about these changes, Yahoo! explained that the changed words were common terms used in web scripting, and were blacklisted to prevent hackers from sending damaging commands via the program's HTML function. Starting before February 7, 2006, Yahoo! Mail ended the practice, and began to add an underscore as a prefix to certain suspicious words and word fragments.
Yahoo Mail may be pushed to an Android device, as Android now supports IMAP4 (as of September 2015). An alternative for Yahoo Mail is to install the free Yahoo Mail app, which provides instant push email. Numerous Yahoo users have complained that push does not function reliably; Yahoo has attributed this to server issues rather than the Smartphone app.
It is not necessary to register with Yahoo! in order to participate in Yahoo! Groups. The basic mailing list functionality is available to any e-mail address, but a Yahoo! ID is required to access most other features.
The Helio Ocean also included several choices of E-mail communication with support for Helio Mail, Yahoo! Mail, Windows Live Hotmail, AOL Mail, Gmail, EarthLink, and two additional user-defined POP or IMAP accounts. Helio began adding support for push e-mail to the Helio Ocean in July 2007 with Push support for Yahoo! Mail, Windows Live Hotmail, and AOL Mail. On April 23, 2008 push support was added for Gmail, along with automatic notifications for POP/IMAP accounts. For a nominal fee per month, connectivity to Microsoft Exchange was available on the Ocean since July 25, 2007. There is also instant messaging support for AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, and Windows Live Messenger.
In April 2011, Yahoo! Mail began rejecting spam reports, which involved sending a copy of the spam with full headers by email to Yahoo's abuse department, offering the use of a form instead. However, the requirement to use a form is prohibited by several Internet RFCs, and the availability of abuse at example.com (in this case abuse at yahoo.com) is required by the Invariants clause of , because the domain has a mail server and an MX record. Yahoo's claim was that its "standard" was better than the Internet standards referred to. This is the only working form through which users can report spam or misuse of the Yahoo! email service.
Yahoo operated a portal that provides the latest news, entertainment, and sports information. The portal also gave users access to other Yahoo services like Yahoo! Search, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Maps, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Groups and Yahoo Messenger.
Incoming mail to Yahoo! addresses can be subjected to deferred delivery as part of Yahoo's incoming spam controls. This can delay delivery of mail sent to Yahoo! addresses without the sender or recipients being aware of it. The deferral is typically of short duration, but may extend up to several hours. Yahoo! does not specifically document this policy in detail, although some information is available.[42][43]
On March 8, 1997, Yahoo! acquired online communications company Four11. Four11's webmail service, Rocketmail, became Yahoo! Mail. Yahoo! also acquired ClassicGames.com and turned it into Yahoo! Games. Yahoo! then acquired direct marketing company Yoyodyne Entertainment, Inc. on October 12, 1998. In January 1999, Yahoo! acquired web hosting provider GeoCities. Another company Yahoo! took over was eGroups, which became Yahoo! Groups in June 2000. On March 8, 1998, Yahoo! launched Yahoo! Pager, an instant messaging service that was renamed Yahoo! Messenger a year later.
Yahoo! Messenger (sometimes abbreviated Y!M) was an advertisement-supported instant messaging client and associated protocol provided by Yahoo!. Yahoo Messenger was provided free of charge and could be downloaded and used with a generic "Yahoo ID" which also allowed access to other Yahoo! services, such as Yahoo! Mail, where users could be automatically notified when they received new email. Yahoo! also offered PC-to-PC, PC-to-Phone and Phone-to-PC service, file transfers, webcam hosting, text messaging service, and chat rooms in various categories.
In 2004, in response to Google's release of Gmail, Yahoo! upgraded the storage of all free Yahoo! Mail accounts from 4 MB to 1 GB, and all Yahoo! Mail Plus accounts to 2 GB. On July 9, 2004, Yahoo! acquired e-mail provider Oddpost to add an Ajax interface to Yahoo! Mail Beta. Google also released Google Talk, a voice over IP and instant messaging service, on August 24, 2005. On October 13, 2005, Yahoo! and Microsoft announced that Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger would become interoperable. In 2007, Yahoo! took out the storage meters, thus allowing users unlimited storage.
On June 20, 2007, Yahoo introduced a selection-based search feature called Yahoo Shortcuts. When activated this selection-based search feature enabled users to invoke search using only their mouse and receive search suggestions in floating windows while remaining on Yahoo properties such as Yahoo Mail. This feature was only active on Yahoo web pages or pages within the Yahoo Publisher Network. Yahoo Shortcuts required the content-owner to modify the underlying HTML of his or her webpage to call out the specific keywords to be enhanced. The technology for context-aware selection-based search on Yahoo pages was first developed by Reiner Kraft.
In 2010, Yahoo and Nokia made a strategic agreement for Yahoo to replace Ovi Mail and Ovi Chat with Yahoo mail and chat products. The migration began in the spring of 2011.
Yahoo! made a deal with the online communications company Four11 for co-branded white pages. Marvin Gavin, who worked at Four11 as the Director of International Business Development, said "We always had a bias about being acquired by Yahoo. They were more entrepreneurial than Microsoft. We had a great cultural fit – it made a lot of sense." In the end, Yahoo! acquired Four11 for $96 million. The purpose behind acquiring Four11 was the company's RocketMail webmail service, which launched in 1997. Yahoo! announced the acquisition on October 8, 1997,[12] close to the time that Yahoo! Mail was launched.[13] Yahoo! chose acquisition rather than internal platform development, because, as Healy said, "Hotmail was growing at thousands and thousands users per week. We did an analysis. For us to build, it would have taken four to six months, and by then, so many users would have taken an email account. The speed of the market was critical."
The transition to Yahoo! Mail was not easy for many Rocketmail users.[14] On March 21, 2002, Yahoo! eliminated free software client access and introduced the $29.99 per year Mail Forwarding Service.[15] Mary Osako, a Yahoo! Spokeswoman, told CNET, "For-pay services on Yahoo!, originally launched in February 1999, have experienced great acceptance from our base of active registered users, and we expect this adoption to continue to grow."
In late 2013, in regard to a multi-week Yahoo Mail outage and massive user dissatisfaction with the site re-design, Bonforte said at a weekly employee meeting that Yahoo would have to "kick users hard" in the nuts before they would leave Yahoo Mail. Jeff left Yahoo in 2018
In October 2005, Alibaba Group formed a strategic partnership with Yahoo! and acquired Yahoo! China, a Chinese portal previously launched on 24 September 1999 that focuses on Internet services like news, email, and search. In April 2013, Alibaba Group announced that, as part of the agreement to buy back the Yahoo! Mail stake, that they would suspend technological support for China Yahoo! Mail service and begin migration of Yahoo! China Mail accounts. Several options were offered to users to make the transition as smooth as possible, and Yahoo! China users had four months to migrate their accounts to the Aliyun mail service, the Yahoo! Mail service in the United States, or to another third-party e-mail provider of the user's choice. Yahoo! China closed its mail service on 19 August 2013. E-mails sent to Yahoo! China accounts could be forwarded to an Alimail box until 31 December 2014. Users were also allowed to transfer e-mail accounts to yahoo.com or any other e-mail service. It is estimated there are no more than a million users with Yahoo! Mail for China and chances are they also own other e-mail accounts.
Oddpost was purchased by Yahoo! on July 9, 2004, and became the new version of their Yahoo! Mail service. On September 14, 2005, Yahoo! Mail started letting some users register to beta test the new Yahoo! Mail web client.
Yahoo updated the mail service with a "more subtle" redesign in 2015, as well as improving mobile features, and introducing the Yahoo Account Key, a smartphone-based replacement for password logins.[37]
11 other properties were listed that Yahoo was interested in developing into feature sites within the portal to take the place of the "Sunset" and "Merge" vacancies, including the prior feature services (before the new Yahoo Mail was launched), were Yahoo Address Book, Calendar, and Notepad. Despite Notepad being listed as a feature service instead of sunset or merge in 2010, Yahoo has since taken steps to de-emphasize Notepad. For example, in January 2013, Notepad was no longer linked within the new Yahoo mail service, although it continued to be linked in the older Classic version. Also, starting in mid- to late January 2013, Notepad was no longer searchable.
Yahoo provided Internet communication services such as Yahoo Messenger and Yahoo Mail. As of May 2007, its e-mail service would offer unlimited storage.