Yahoo Mail gets first major revamp in five years

Yahoo Mail is getting its biggest redesign since 2005 to make it a message hub for its 279 million users, according to BBC News.

At the centre of the revamp is a plan to make the communications system much more compatible with social media.

This means users can post updates to Facebook and Twitter without ever leaving Yahoo Mail. Texting and sending instant messages has been updated. Yahoo said the service will be twice as fast as Google's Gmail and Microsoft's Hotmail.

Users will also be able to view photos and videos from Flickr, Picasa and YouTube inside their e-mail inbox.

"People spend more than 30 billion minutes a month on Yahoo Mail," Dave McDowell, Yahoo Mail senior product director told BBC News.

"It is a critically important product to our users and this represents [the] most significant upgrade to Yahoo mail in five years."

Other upgrades to Yahoo's service include improved spam filtering, and tools to search through mail that will help better sort and prioritise messages. By revamping its mail system, Yahoo is mirroring refreshes already pushed through by rivals.