Yahoo Mail Goes Ad-Free

At the end of last week, Yahoo quietly took a step to improve the experience of untold millions of e-mail users: It stopped sticking one-line advertisements at the end of messages sent from its free Yahoo Mail Web e-mail service.

Yahoo announced the change in a cheerily sarcastic blog post: "You've almost certainly seen them before, but as of a few days ago you won't be seeing them again. Tagline advertisements (which were inserted at the end of e-mail messages) were comprised of short messages for a variety of products, but are now comprised of nothing!"

The Yahoo blog continued: "I for one am going to particularly miss the frequent Yahoo Mobile ad (which replicated on each reply in a thread) encouraging folks to 'be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all' with Yahoo! Mobile, but I suppose I'll learn to cope."

I'm glad somebody at the company had recognized the silliness of these repetitive, eminently ignorable one-liners. The only time I ever paid particular attention to them was when I replied to a message below the original text, in which case I felt obliged to delete the tagline for the sake of neatness.

With Yahoo Mail and Google's Gmail now delivering messages free of tacked-on ads, Hotmail and AOL (which has even stapled taglines to the outgoing messages of paying users) now look seriously behind the times.

-- Rob Pegoraro

Adapted from the Faster Forward blog. For more entries, visithttp://blog.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward.