xtra mail customers are going to Yahoo! mail

The big mail transfer is finally coming… and not before time.  Telecom’s somewhat clueless (and expensive) marketers have managed to mangle thing though, for a start using the name “Yahoo!Xtra Bubble” for the new service.

Xtra subscribers will get moved to Yahoo Mail (the Beta is great), and will also get Flickr Pro, a 1 Gb Flickr “briefcase” and, interestingly, Norton Anti Virus. That NAV is a smart move for an ISP – maybe it will help prevent their customers computers being taken over by bots.

You have to marvel at Telecom sometimes – It seems to (a rather exceedingly cynical) me that the only reason to call this “Yahoo!xtra Bubble” was to create a new reason for throwing away marketing dollars. Have a look at the promo website, called, appropriately, yourbubble.co.nz.

Some quotes, one from each of the tabs:

Simply take a few minutes to complete the registration process (coming soon!) ….

i.e another premature marketing ejaculation, which reminds us all of some other Telecom site..

Create your own unique personal homepage that lets you customise the page to display the news, entertainment and information you want to see from a choice of over 300,000 content sources.

you mean like I already do on Google? and, well, Yahoo?? Why restrict this to paying subscribers?

With Yahoo!Xtra Messenger, you can exchange messages in real time over the web with your Xtra email address. No need to sign up for other services with hard-to-remember options and passwords.

That will be interesting – can Yahoo! messenger take on MSN in NZ? But what is with that gratuitous swipe on the second line?

Flickr Pro has loads of photo storage and you can upload lots of photos in high resolution.

Not exactly specific there. For the record, the Flickr pro upgrade costs $25US (included free here – it is owned by Yahoo!) and gives you unlimited storage, uploads, bandwidth and permanent archiving. Now what is so hard about saying that? or is this NZ-style Flickr Pro Crippled Version?

Coming soon…
Better Online Security for your computer.
Yahoo!Xtra Online Protection helps guards you and your computer against spyware, hackers, viruses and more.

I guess this is the Norton Anti Virus mentioned in the press release. Once again the marketing demons are too quick for reality.

So overall good news for Xtra customers  – Yahoo!Mail has to be far better than Xtra’s antiquated model, and  it locks in the Yahoo! part of the deal. The Yahoo!xtra website should benefit from cleaner integration with the mail client, and NZ will finally see penetration from one of the giants of the internet. I’m a big Yahoo fan – I’ve had an email address there since 1996 and use several of their services. Partnering with Xtra was always going to be a trying experience for them, so I for one am sticking to my US subscriptions.