Yahoo ditches passwords formore secure email authentication.

New authentication process sends push notification to mobile-device users to confirm their identities

SAN FRANCISCO — Yahoo is ditching passwords in favor of a more sophisticated method of verifying users in a major upgrade to its 18-year-old email service. The Sunnyvale company on Thursday introduced a “password-free” account key that sends a push notification to mobile devices asking users to confirm their identities before checking their emails. The new authentication method, which is optional and part of a broader revamp that makes Yahoo Mail smarter and faster on smartphones, pushes Yahoo to the forefront in email security,

but also risks alienating longtime users accustomed to logging in with passwords.

“It’s pretty controversial to get rid of passwords because consumers actually like them,” said Avivah Litan, a security analyst at research firm Gartner.

But Litan agreed with Yahoo executives that most passwords are weak and worth replacing because they are easily forgotten, easily compromised and typically shared across multiple personal accounts.

Yahoo’s solution is designed to be simpler than the typical two-factor authentication process, which is safer than conventional passwords but has a learning curve. Yahoo’s new process takes little effort, but requires users to have an Internet-connected phone or wristwatch handy, even if they are on a desktop.

“It takes getting used to,” said Jeff Bonforte, Yahoo’s head of communications products, in a press event Wednesday in downtown San Francisco. “Patterns die hard.’’

Yahoo also uses other tools such as network analytics — what it knows of a user’s typical behavior — to keep a user logged in unless unusual activity raises a red flag.

“Everyone will wait and see how it goes,” Litan said. “If this goes well, I think a lot of other companies will follow because passwords are so antiquated and create a false sense of security.”

This is Yahoo Mail’s first major revision in two years. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who in her previous job at Google had helped usher in the rise of Gmail, took some cues from that widely popular service in the 2013 redesign, but outraged some loyal Yahoo users who were confused and annoyed by the new features.

Most of Thursday’s changes are far more aesthetically subtle, though the computing behind them is powerful. The new tools allow for speedier searching of archived content in the Yahoo Mail application on Apple and Android devices, and automatically suggest after just one or two typed letters the most likely recipients of an email a user is composing.

“We think we have the most advanced search in a mobile mail client,” said Fernando Delgado, a Yahoo senior director of product management.

Other improvements include a new feature for socalled “me-mailers” — the roughly 20 percent of Yahoo users who frequently send emails to themselves with todo lists or other notes — that helps them create a notebook of their files. There’s also a feature that adds icons for every verified user — company logos for emails from wellknown banks, stores, airlines and other services — and automatically creates initials for everyone else.

Yahoo Mail, once the leader in Web-based email providers and a crucial springboard for traffic to the company’s finance, sports and news websites, has been playing catchup since Google launched its upstart email service in 2004 and swiftly grew to become the leader. A recent report from market researcher comScore figures show Yahoo Mail and Gmail were equals as recently as 2013, but Gmail now has tens of millions more viewers.

Another Yahoo upgrade is a “multiple mailbox” manager that places separate email accounts under one umbrella tool, allowing Yahoo Mail users to access their emails from AOL or Microsoft’s Hotmail and Outlook.com, and giving Yahoo an even larger body of email content to scan for targeted advertising dollars. Gmail is not included in the mix, though ongoing talks with Google could fold it in later, Bonforte said.