[KM] Keep_Mailing Yahoo! decides to close its email service

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Yahoo! decides to close its email service

28 APRIL 13  by IAN LEADMAN 

Yahoo! has decided its customers don't need their email accounts any more, and is closing the service.

A statement from Yahoo! Mail tells users that they will have four months, until 19 August, to save their emails and switch to another provider. The company suggests moving to AliCloud -- if users do so, any mail sent to the old account address will still be received in the new AliCloud inbox up until the end of 2014.

AliCloud is provided by Alibaba, the giant web company that runs many of China's largest ecommerce sites, including eBay-like Taobao (the tenth-most-viewed site in the world according to Alexa) and the payment platform Alipay, which had more than 700 million registered users as of September 2012 (far surpassing the 128 million users of Paypal).

Yahoo! Mail has been available for more than ten years, but Alibaba and Yahoo! struck a strategic partnership deal in October 2005 that saw the Chinese firm take responsibility for running Yahoo!'s key web products. Yahoo! paid Alibaba $1 billion (£656 million), and in return gained a 40 percent share of Alibaba stock.

Despite having sold some of that, its remaining 24 percent of stock is a highly-valuable asset -- Alibaba handled 1.1 trillion yuan of sales in 2012, more than eBay and Amazon combined. The company is expected to undergo an IPO later this year, with an expected valuation somewhere between £36 billion to £78 billion.

Under new CEO Marissa Mayer, Yahoo! has shed many of its services in a bid to find a more content-focused business strategy. The company announced last week six more of these to be shuttered by the end of April 2013 -- Upcoming, Yahoo! Deals, Yahoo! SMS Alerts, Yahoo! Kids, Yahoo! Mail and Messenger feature phone apps and older versions of its Yahoo! Mail app.

However, Yahoo!'s £20 million acquisition of Summly (and the hiring of its creator, Nick D'Aloisio) last month shows the company isn't settling to just cut off redundant limbs, and is actively shifting its focus.

The closure of Yahoo! Mail will leave Yahoo! with its home web portal as its only presence in the most populous country in the world. While Yahoo! Mail had reportedly had more than 700 million in 2009, its popularity has rapidly waned to the extent it is now only the fifth-most-popular email service. 

Millions of customers are still likely to be affected by Yahoo! Mail's closure. It is a win-win situation for Google & Microsoft.

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