Yahoo! Mail API Released

Yahoo! made a rather bold decision this week. The company chose to remove all storage limits from its web-based email client. The immediate consensus is that people like the move to limitless very much. A few years ago, unlimited storage may have gotten two thumbs up from Yahoo!’s fellowship, but it wouldn’t have received the response it’s being awarded today. Most people were sending text-only messages in the past (most of course still are); now our inboxes are stuffed with text and high-res photo attachments, video clips, and media-rich PDFs. Because the expanding role email plays in our lives, the move by Yahoo! made only days ago is hardly an insignificant one. And hey, Yahoo! finally stepped up strong to competition from Google, right?

Only a short time after the announcement of “unlimited email for all!”, however, Yahoo! has dropped even more impactful news on us all. By the time you read this, the kit will be available to all [developers].

We speak of the much-anticipated Yahoo! Mail API, a powerful developer kit supposedly ready for release for quite a while, and it could be the biggest splash made in the world of email yet. (Okay, a tad excessive there.)

Consider it carefully, though. Nobody serves more email accounts than Yahoo!. No one handles a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly traffic load greater than Yahoo!. There are more eyes trawling Yahoo! than any other portal. Thus third-party developers have the chance to reach the biggest audience of emailers ever to be opened.

Surely not everyone using Yahoo! Mail will care about third-party software. They do so because it’s there. It’s the most well-known of all web-based email services, and that’s basically all that needs to be said about that. But the Internet is an economy of scale. There are the biggest and then there are the smallest. The biggest tend to have the most wealth, in terms of revenue, capital, and overall value, while the smallest have the least. Therefore a developer given Yahoo! Mail API would naturally have a chance to grow a user base to scale larger than any before.

Yahoo! won’t be worse off after the release of a Mail API. The company will attract many of the IPs that detracted from Yahoo! Mail’s aged interface, storage restriction and lack of free POP3 accessibility by unlocking the golden gate. And add-ons, or extensions, can only make a product appeal to the consumer more.

For many months, it’s been a matter of “when”. We now know the answer. And if Yahoo! understands the nature of Web 2.0 – and we’re sure they do – the release of the Yahoo! Mail API may prove to be the best decision the company has made in years.

Removing the barriers of storage inside the world’s most popular email client wasn’t a bad move. We’ve been wishing and hoping for the extra space. But we yearn more for a better client. The new Yahoo! Mail Beta is aesthetically appealing to some, but it lags in many other areas. The company wants to create a desktop client-type environment with desktop client-like performance and desktop client-like expandability, and with the API it will be on the road toward achieving that goal. It’s doubtful that the API will result in miracles, but as long as Yahoo! Mail maintains its ease of use while ventures out into the “brave unknown”, it’s a safe bet that Yahoo! will do just fine with the new “open” Mail.