In order to address the growing demand for e-mail accounts, Yahoo has decided to introduce two new e-mail domains: Ymail and Rocketmail.

Yahoo Mail has already 266 million active accounts and Yahoo wants to make it easier for its customers to get an account name.

The company officials feel like their service has become just too big and the users should find complicated combinations in order to get an ID.

Despite the rising popularity of the instant messaging, the e-mail is still the most popular Web application in many countries.

However, as the Yahoo Mail universe kept growing bigger and bigger, the company considered that it has to help its cutomers to get simpler, straightforward names for their e-mail addresses.

The new email domains will be launched starting this Thursday and the company said that the accounts will have the same interface, unlimited storage and localized country versions will be available.

Of course, those who will choose to create their the email address using ymail or rocketmail, will be able to use it as the ID for Yahoo other services, like Yahoo Messenger or Flickr.

In fact, Rocketmail is the domain name used by Four11 Corp, the company acquired by Yahoo back in 1997 for $80 million. Yahoo Mail of largely based on the technologies acquired from Four11 Corp. At the time of the acquisition, Yahoo allowed to the customers to keep their existing email addresses, but it suspended the possibility to create new ones.

As for Ymail, the new domain is inspired by Yahoo Mobile service and it seems to be a part oof the company’s effort to expand its presence in the mobile universe. Yahoo said that the rollout of the new domains is scheduled to start at around midday on Thursday.

Yahoo will offer some special e-mail addresses for a charity auction through eBay and the benefits will be donated to The Breast Cancer Research Foundation, Ocean Conservancy, The Point Foundation, Right to Play and World Wildlife Fund.

Yahoo Mail underwent a lot of changes in the past few years, from a new easier, simple interface to the integration with Yahoo Messenger. Yahoo Mail offers also unlimited storage free of charge.

However, Yahoo efforts to keep developing its mail offer have paid off and according to a research released by Hitwise in February 2008, Yahoo Mail is the leader of the most popular email websites in the United States, with a market share of 54,63 percent. It is followed by Windows Live Mail, which has 25,54 percent, while Gmail trails in a distant third, with only 5,51 percent.

Still, despite its third place, Gmail has the fastest growing rate. The Google’s webmail was opened to the general public just one year ago, in February 2007, after three years of invitation-only beta. According to the research company comScore only in the last year 30 million people have created a Gmail address.

Similar to Yahoo ID, the Gmail account name can be used in order to access other Google’s services as well.