Yahoo! Mail Web Service - your mail, your way

At the Yahoo! Open Hack Day we did a prerelease of the Yahoo! Mail Web Service. It was a tremendous success, drawing four teams of hackers who worked late into the night through the early morning to build some terrific hacks. Today we’re announcing the official release of the web service.

What exactly does this mean? As a developer, it means open access to a platform with 250 million users. Right out of the box you’ll have a potential user base that’s larger than Windows Live Hotmail, AOL Mail and Gmail. As a user, it means new and interesting ways of accessing your Yahoo! Mail account. To get a better idea of what kinds of applications you can expect, keep your eye on the Yahoo! Mail Application Gallery. The gallery will fill up with more applications over time, however we’ve already got a great collection of Open Hack Day applications as well as employee contributed applications.

The web service has two tiers of access: one for free accounts and another for premium accounts (broadband partner accounts and Yahoo! Mail Plus accounts). Free users will be able to access mail preview information, your list of folders and a list of messages in each folder, for instance. Premium users will have full access to the web service, including the ability to read, send, save and search messages. As an added incentive for developers, we have a new affiliate program with Commission Junction. For every user you upsell to Yahoo! Mail Plus, Yahoo! will give you $10.

More details regarding both the webservice and the affiliate program can be found on the Yahoo! Developer Network. If you’re looking to interact with Yahoo! engineers and external developers, we’ve set up a Yahoo! Group.

So fire up your code editors and show us what you’ve got!

Ryan Kennedy
Yahoo! Mail Web Service Engineer
Yahoo! Mail Evangelist