Yahoo ready to deliver on its promise of e-mail upgrade (AP)

SAN FRANCISCO - Yahoo Inc. gives its popular e-mail service a facelift has long promised to make it more attractive for people who are more and more use Facebook, Twitter, Google and other alternatives online to communicate.

The changes announced build Tuesday on a redesigned E-mail format that Yahoo has begun test seven months ago. Estimated 277 million users of the free Yahoo mail service will be switched to the new version in the coming weeks.

The redesign will allow updates to Facebook and Twitter accounts to be displayed for Yahoo email boxes. Redesigned service is supposed to be twice as fast and able to send attachments of up to 100 megabytes. Other tools include better junk mail controls and the ability to chat with your friends and family connected on Facebook.

Yahoo is counting on changes to attract and retain email users at a time when more people are flocking to the rival Gmail service led by the head of the research Internet Google Inc..

Even if Yahoo rest superior to Gmail service, it has been losing ground in the last year. By April, vaunted Yahoo email users 277 million worldwide, a decrease of approximately $ 3 million, or 1%, from the same period last year, according to research firm comScore Inc.. During this time, Gmail has risen to 220 million users Worldwide, $ 43 million, or 24 per cent over the past year.

Most of the gains of Gmail seems to be done at the expense of the service Hotmail from Microsoft Corp., which remains the world leader with 327 million users, according to comScore. But this figure fell by 27 million, or 8% from last year.

Cultivate loyal email users is important because they tend to be frequent visitors and they often remain connected when you use other online services managed by email providers. The return of travel and logged in activity creates more opportunities to display advertisements Internet, the main way that Yahoo and Google make money.

Yahoo, however, was not lure advertisers as Google for years, a problem which has weighed on the stock of Yahoo.

The upgrade of email should be among the signs of progress CEO Carol Bartz Yahoo said Wednesday when she and other executives of large companies are scheduled to update analysts on their recovery plan.