The new Yahoo Mail has just added a pretty enticing feature to its plethora of social-networking traits: the ability to send text messages to mobile phones from inside the Webmail’s interface.

From the 4MB of storage space Yahoo offered back in 1997 to the infinite amount of space most of us enjoy today, Yahoo’s mail service suffered tremendous changes and you can’t say the company didn’t strive to offer its clients the best of the best.

The new AJAX-filled interface might be a bit hard to load in most browsers, but hey, it’s easier and more intuitive now to move e-mails to different folders, search for old messages has been improved (Yahoo’s engineers have brought up technologies that allow you to narrow results to find a specific sender, folder, date, attachment type or message status) and with the possibility to chat with your friends inside the Web-mail without opening your Yahoo Messenger client one can only congratulate the Sunnyvale, CA-based Internet behemoth for its efforts. Not to mention reading the news…

However, this appears insufficient to Yahoo’s mail team, which has recently implemented “yet another officious” add-on, allowing you to send text messages to mobile phones.

The service, which is still in beta-testing, will be available only in the US, Canada, India and the Philippines. All you need to is hit send after typing a message and the mobile phone number of the person you wish to contact.

The recent overhaul is included in Yahoo’s strategy to regain at least a part of its former online audience, from the likes of YouTube, MySpace or Facebook. Overthrowing Google from its dominant position on the search market is far from being a realistic objective for the Sunnyvale company, which has seen its profits and the investors’ trust declining in the recent period, so a more “social-networking friendly” approach would be more suitable.

In an attempt to appeal to younger audiences even more, Yahoo made its instant messaging client available inside browsers and it also completed the interoperability pact with Windows Live Messenger. By making Yahoo Messenger available for use inside browsers like Mozilla, Safari, Opera or IE, Yahoo is targeting travelers, business professionals on the go and office workers whose companies block IM software downloads on their internal networks for security reasons. Another important category is made-up of Web-surfers from Internet coffees all over the world.

Currently, Yahoo boasts with more than 254 million Yahoo Mail accounts set up on its servers, compared to Microsoft’s only 224 million Hotmail accounts.

"Our goal is to make (Yahoo) Mail a more social experience," John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail, said in a phone interview with Reuters. "We really look at ourselves as sitting on top of the largest dormant social network out there."

Kremer said by upgrading the e-mail service technology, the Sunnyvale, California-based company aims to lay the groundwork for adding more social-networking features later this year.

For the text-messaging feature, Yahoo needs to sign a lot of contracts with local mobile operators as it expands the service to other areas. We don’t know yet whether this mail-add-on will require free Yahoo mail users to buy credit (a move similar to the Skype’s business model) or whether Yahoo will pay the use of the mobile infrastructure with money it gets from advertisement. We do know however the fact that the text-messaging will be accessed through a separate window, whose keyboard shortcut will be T, and that the 

"We'll continue to offer both products for the foreseeable future and we'll let our users decide what's the right Yahoo Mail experience for them," Kremer added, also saying that the upcoming enhancements (including the recent text-messaging feature) will be rolled out progressively in the next six-weeks for existing customers. New users of the Yahoo Mail service will get them immediately after setting up an account.

One good reason for which Yahoo is striving to offer its customers a richer panoply of services, all in one place, is the need to be more attractive to advertisers. “The battle for the inbox” is fought with behemoths like Microsoft and Google because the online advertisement space included in each free mail account is later on sold for important amounts of cash. Making the inbox more appealing is critical for the business, since users who prefer mail clients like Thunderbird or Outlook are not clicking on the commercials (they simply import the body of the e-mail), so Yahoo loses money.

Yahoo is also offering an ads-free inbox, simply called Yahoo Plus, which allows users to set up POP access, e-mail forwarding and no promotional taglines in messages, plus a more thorough spam protection, for $19.99 per year.