Yahoo Inc. is upgrading its popular but aging email service. This move is intended to make Yahoo Mail more appealing to users who are drawn to Facebook, Twitter and other social media as a form of communication.

The announced changes will focus on a redesigned email format. The updates will enable Facebook and Twitter users to post their status updates in Yahoo's email boxes. The new Yahoo Mail is supposed to be faster and capable of sending files up to 100Mb in mail attachments. Other improvements are better junk mail controls and chatting options with user contacts that are logged in to Facebook.

This overhaul also hopes to attract new email users when most online users are leaving to Gmail, run by Internet Search Engine giant Google. Yahoo hopes through these changes that users who are more in tune with social media will stay with the email provider.

Yahoo Mail is still larger than Gmail but it has steadily lost important market shares. In April, Yahoo boasted more than 277 million email users but this is a 3 million drop from the population of email users from the same time last year. Gmail on the other hand has gained 43 million users from the same time last year.

Yahoo wants to cultivate email users loyalty because these users are Yahoo and Google's cash cows. Logged in users provide more opportunities to show Internet ads. Yahoo is lagging in advertising revenues, unlike Google who has seen nothing but a steady rise in advertisers.

Yahoo mail users should expect their accounts to be upgraded in the next few months. Yahoo hopes the upgrade will make their stock rise again but only time will tell if the strategy works.