AOL Mail Gets New Plug-ins, Yahoo! Mail Focuses on Spam Protection

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 22 Jan 2009

The recently created AOL Products and Technologies Group has been hard at work on new features to satisfy the 48 million people that have a mail account with AOL, and what they’ve come up with is a platform that allows you to integrate 3rd party plug-ins to AOL Mail. Thanks to this new feature it is now possible to integrate your Gmail account or your Yahoo! Mail account. In related mail client news, it must be said that Yahoo! is making life hard(er) for spammers by beefing up its spam protection.

Senior Vice President of AOL Mail comments: “People who are using AOL Mail represent an already-engaged audience. As we continue to extend our capabilities far beyond sending and receiving mail, we are challenging ourselves and third-party developers everywhere to create new opportunities for delivering customized, relevant content using our mail platform.”

In order to check out AOL’s new offering, you must first set up an account. If you already have one, then you will be able to enhance your AOL Mail experience by choosing between lots of mini-apps which will be displayed in the right-hand sidebar. Besides Gmail and Yahoo! Mail, there are also plug-ins for Flickr, Sticky Notes, MapQuest, stock prices, AIM instant messenger, AOL radio, and so on. The downside is that you can only keep an eye on your Gmail or Yahoo! inbox, you cannot actually read the messages within AOL Mail – there is no full integration at this time, so instead a new browser window will be opened and you will be transferred to the message you want to read.

Moving on to Yahoo! and their mail client, the latest news is that the Santa Clara company is employing new means of ensuring that you only get the mail you want to get, none of that spam nonsense.

“One way we’re turning up the heat on the spammers is by utilizing even more state-of-the-art technology. Recently, Yahoo!’s anti-spam team has been using a “supercomputer” consisting of thousands of individual PCs — part of our open source Hadoop project — to help detect spammers. We’re teamed up with several top universities on this research, looking for more ways to find and block the bad guys even faster, before they can do their damage,” explains Anti-Spam Czar with Yahoo!, Mark Risher.


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