As of noon Pacific yesterday, Yahoo! is offering new email accounts on the ymail.com and rocketmail.com domains in an effort to "attract Web surfers unhappy with their current addresses."

I missed the launch by an hour, but still managed to grab a few accounts for my name and business name, such as samstevens@ and stevensmedia@. My plan was to simply forward these for now to my Gmail accounts.

Imagine my surprise when I couldn't find the email forwarding option! I did end up finding it, under the Mail Plus features.That's right, to simply forward a @ymail.com address, Yahoo! requires me to pay $19.95/year. Who are they kidding?

Combine this with no IMAP access and an extremely cluttered web mail interface, and all we have here is a money grab attempt with no strong value proposition.

I want Yahoo! to survive as an independent company, I really do, but they're going to have to get a helluva lot craftier than this if they want to swim in the same pond as Google and Microsoft.