For all you millennials out there, Yahoo isn’t dead – far from it. In fact, I still have a Yahoo account in my password manager that I open maybe once or twice a year. It reminds me of a museum, every time I peek inside. College applications and Flickr notifications from two decades ago, email chains with long lost friends, chat room updates. No utility in there, only sentiment.
That’s the problem Nikhil Gandhi has been hired to solve. Gandhi joined as SVP of Engineering for Yahoo Mail nine months ago, after stints at Apple, Facebook and TikTok. He now runs the mail infrastructure of a company most people under the age of 25 associate with their parents.
“I think that a lot of people have their first email as Yahoo, and we want it to be their primary email,” he says, with no exaggeration and a straight face. “Yahoo is supposed to be your friend, philosopher, and guide, and we still continue to believe in that.” It’s a nice line, I think to myself. But one that comes with an enormous ask in 2026, where the emailing landscape has completely changed.
“One of the things that people don’t realize is for the last 30 years, emails have not changed,” Nikhil tells me. Same reverse-chronological list, same old looking for information. And the inbox search, he points out, exists because the inbox failed to show you what you were looking for in the first place.
His example is one every frequent flyer will recognise. “More often than not, you go to the airport, then you search your email to find your boarding pass. The moment you land somewhere, you search your email to find your Uber or the rental car. The moment you land in a hotel, you actually will again go and search your email to find the hotel reservation. And the searches are not the best because when you search for Marriott, for example, it will show you Marriott for the last 10 years.”
So Yahoo’s bet is on refining the email inbox from being reactive to proactive. “So it is an email we are hoping to have where it’s an inbox you don’t have to open,” Gandhi highlights. “The inbox will talk to you. The inbox will tell you what you need to know. You really don’t have to spend time searching and figuring out emails or attachments.”
Every other product on your phone is optimising and maximising for time spent in the app. Gandhi is explicitly optimising against it, as far as Yahoo Mail’s email inbox app is concerned.
“The north star goal we have is that email should be a personal productivity profile, which will help you get your job done,” Gandhi explains. “We really want people to spend as little time on it to get their job done. So you move on and spend time on other things.”
Yahoo already has a proof of concept in this regard, called Priority Inbox. It’s live in select markets, aiming to sort and prioritise the emails you actually read versus hundreds you never bother to open. “And we see a 90 plus percent engagement on the priority inbox because we know people use those,” Gandhi emphasizes. “And the beauty is that the inbox is customized. So priority for you will be different than priority for me.” Planner, launched in the US this year, goes one step further – syncing important and time-sensitive notes and attachments out of the email body and into your calendar.
I put the obvious question to Gandhi, where a Gmail user isn’t going to abandon 20 years of archive and start over. Neither is someone whose employer forces them to use Outlook. So what gives? He agreed with the premise before answering it.
“Let’s say you’ve been a user of Gmail for the last 20 years. I can never convince you to drop what you’re doing and start a new email address because you have a history there, you have nostalgia stored” Gandhi says, and rightly so. “All we’re asking is to forget about the email, focus instead on the email client.”
This is the strategy, in a nutshell. Yahoo Mail isn’t only a mail service – it’s a mail app as well, and Gandhi’s real competitor isn’t Gmail so much as the default Apple Mail client sitting untouched on a few hundred million iPhones. “Apple doesn’t focus on the client because that’s not their bread and butter,” he noted.
Plug your Gmail and Outlook into Yahoo Mail’s client app, and the summaries, receipts view and unsubscribe tools apply automatically to mail Yahoo never handled. Bottomline, you don’t need a @yahoo email address to experience the goodness of Yahoo’s client app.
“That client will search across inboxes,” notes Gandhi. “The client will give you a common search, common landing port so you don’t have to open three email addresses or three clients.”
Nowhere does that mean you change your old email address, Gandhi isn’t advocating it either. “I’m not saying stop using the email address you’ve had for 20 years. Heck, I would personally not do that myself.” Gandhi just wants you to give the new Yahoo app a try, bring your email into their inbox, and see for yourself.
Ask Gandhi what Yahoo Mail’s competitive advantage is in 2026, that a newer, smarter rival doesn’t have, and his response isn’t AI or foundational models – but memory.
“Because we have been around for the last 30 years, we have a lot of data. We have a lot of user patterns. So we know what kind of emails you like. We know what kind of emails you open.”
Gandhi’s view on Yahoo Mail’s AI restraint is interesting, where the guiding principle is deploying AI-as-a-tool rather than AI-as-purpose, deliberately in contrast with the rest of the industry.
“We basically want to start with the problem and leverage AI as a tool to solve the problem,” Gandhi outlines. “I’m sure a lot of other companies have an AI platform and a tool and then they’re like, now how do we use it? And then they create use cases on that.” Yahoo, Gandhi adds flatly, has no dog in that fight. “We don’t have our own proprietary models that we have to go and sell to other companies.”
That discipline and clarity of thought of what AI won’t do shows in what Yahoo hasn’t become, Gandhi points out. “So if you look at it, it’s still the same email. It’s still the same inbox. It’s just getting smarter, leveraging the AI tools that we have behind the scenes,” Gandhi emphasizes – and it’s all opt-in.
Yahoo Mail claims to be still number two globally. Gandhi’s reflection on it is different from the usual corporate deflection.
“Because Yahoo Mail was number one at a certain point of time, therefore now the perception is, oh, we have lost the battle. Conversely, if we were fourth and came second, we would have been, oh wow, we are second now. So I think that the number game becomes very complicated if you over-index on that,” according to Nikhil Gandhi.
Half of Yahoo’s user base, the company says, is Gen Z and millennial – a statistic almost nobody in India would guess, where Gmail rules supreme with an ironfist. And nearly everything Gandhi described as the reimagined inbox is a US pilot. “So a lot of the AI features are right now tested out in the US market, and as we see success, as we are more confident, we’ll roll out to other markets,” Gandhi confirms.
Where does India figure into Yahoo Mail’s ecosystem? Yahoo Mail’s production and engineering teams – the ones keeping a system serving hundreds of millions of users – run out of Bangalore, and Gandhi wants more than that: “our goal is to run full end-to-end features running out of the Bangalore office.”
He’s also clear-eyed that Indian demand isn’t American demand. For a market oversaturated with AI this and AI that, the task is to deliver the opposite of intelligence overload inside the inbox, especially for Tier-2 and Tier-3 users in India coming to terms with a more digital lifestyle. “Just give me an email I need to give to my bank, don’t overcomplicate it,” says Gandhi, echoing their need.
And simultaneously, a generation raised on DMs asks why email exists at all. Gandhi’s own teenager asked him exactly that. His answer was that email survived by becoming a personal digital ledger. “All your tax documents, all your property documents are all over email,” he says. “So emails are actually getting even more important, and here to stay.”
He’s probably right. Whether all our emails as a digital personal ledger will reside inside Yahoo’s app is what the next 12-18 months will decide. And for the first time in a long while, Yahoo Mail has an interesting argument.