[A2k] Yahoo opens up its e-mail program

[Teresa Hackett (eIFL)]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5398310.stm

Yahoo opens up its e-mail program

The initiative could mean new ways to deal with mail messages
Yahoo is letting web programmers get their hands on the core code for
its e-mail program.

By opening up the code Yahoo hopes to help create a series of innovative
ways to deal with e-mail messages.

Eventually it said there could be "tens of thousands" of add-ons and
extras for the e-mail reader.

Yahoo is only the latest of the big web companies to open up their main
services to the wider code developing community.

Although Yahoo plans to keep control of the code that deals with user
names and passwords, programmers will be able to tinker with almost
every other part of the e-mail reading program. Yahoo Mail has more than
257 million registered accounts.

The initiative could result in new looks for the Yahoo e-mail reader,
innovative ways to display messages to get a quick idea of message
contents or a series of add-ons that do more with the information found
in mail messages.

"Yahoo is a very large company but we can't build every application that
a user might want," Chad Dickerson, head of Yahoo's software developer
relations, told the Reuters news agency.

In making this move, Yahoo is following the lead of many web firms
including Google, Amazon, Flickr and business software maker Salesforce.com.

Before now only Yahoo's broadband partners, such as BT, have had access
to the innards of the e-mail program.