Reuters reports that Yahoo! Mail is rolling out a new feature that will allow users to send free Email to SMS text messages to mobile phones of their contacts from the Yahoo! Webmail interface.

Initially, the Email to SMS text-messaging feature will be available to webmail users in United States, Canada, India and the Philippines. To text a friend, the user needs to enter the recipient’s mobile phone number in the “To” field, type the text in the message body and hit send. It remains to be seen whether the free or paid Yahoo! POP3 users will be able to do the same from their desktop email client though technically there is no difference in sending email from webmail or desktop email email client since both go through Yahoo!’s SMTP servers.

Other new features include:

Email to Chat: The Convert to Chat option when composing a new email that allows you to chat in real-time with your Yahoo! or Windows Live MSN instant messenger buddies from the webmail interface.

Improved Search: Narrow results to find a specific sender, folder, date, attachment type or message status.

Intelligent Shortcuts & Lookups: Yahoo! Mail can detect dates, addresses and proper names (underlined with blue dots) and allow users to link quickly to Yahoo Calendar, Yahoo Maps or Yahoo Search for that data.