Yahoo To Offer Unlimited E-mail Storage

[Tech Star]

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) plans to offer unlimited e-mail storage to its roughly quarter of a billion users, starting in May, it said on Tuesday.

The world's biggest e-mail service is scrapping its free e-mail storage limit of 1 gigabyte, or about a billion bytes of data, responding to explosive growth in attachment sizes as people share ever more photos, music and videos via e-mail.

Microsoft has a 2 gigabyte free e-mail storage limit, while Google caps its Gmail service at 2.8 gigabytes.

"We are giving them no reason to ever have to delete old e-mails," Yahoo co-founder David Filo said in a phone interview. "You can keep stuff forever."

Officials said the decision to remove e-mail storage limits reflects the plunging cost of storage as new personal computers store up to a trillion bytes of data and owners of 80-gigabyte iPods can carry 100 hours of video in their pockets.

By contrast, when Yahoo first introduced its e-mail service a little under a decade ago, it capped individual storage at 4 megabytes per user. At that time, an "ultra high-density" floppy disk for personal computers then held 144 megabytes.

"People should think about e-mail as something where they are archiving their lives," said Filo, who remains active in managing technical operations at the Sunnyvale, California, company and carries the honorific title of Chief Yahoo.

Starting in May, the changeover to unlimited storage should take a month, said John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail.

"We have been closely monitoring average usage. We are comfortable that our users are far under 1 gig(abyte), on average," Kremer said by phone. "What we see are an increasing number of rich media files as consumers send more photos."

One caveat Yahoo makes is that the offer is for personal use and subject to guidelines against abuse that apply to Yahoo Mail. No one can build a business giving away unlimited storage to other consumers using Yahoo Mail, executives said.

Two countries -- China and Japan -- are excluded. "We will continue working with these markets on their storage plans," Kremer said in a statement. Yahoo is a minority owner with partner Softbank in Yahoo Japan Corp. and a part owner with Alibaba of the Yahoo business in China.

Filo said Yahoo is looking at lifting caps on storage for other services such as its Flickr photo-sharing service. "We are looking at those on a case-by-case basis," he said.

It's a far cry from when giving away 2 megabytes of data was considered a big deal, said David Nakayama, Yahoo's group vice president of engineering and developer of RocketMail, which Yahoo acquired and relaunched as Yahoo Mail in 1997.

In a posting to Yahoo's corporate blog, he said capacity when Yahoo Mail started was 200 gigabytes for all customers.

"I remember getting in a room to plan our RocketMail launch over a decade ago and worrying that our original plan of a 2 megabyte quota wasn't enough, and that we needed to be radical and DOUBLE the storage to 4 megabyte per account!" he wrote.

News Source: Yahoo News

[v0ltage789]

hopefully gmail responds to this :)

[tekno]

Sounds good. Just a matter of time before other companies do the same.

[ZonoBurk]

Sounds good. Just a matter of time before other companies do the same.

AOL has for a while now. Now I'm waiting on Hotmail. :)

[DJLunacy]

Here we go again....

I've got plenty of Gmail space for now but if they bump it up i would be happy. Can't say that i make extensive use out of my yahoo e-mail address but, there are a few features that i like.

[Dark Reaper]

To me, I think that this Unlimited email storage is stupid.

I rather have bigger file attachments.

[XIII]

If they don't allow us to attach larger files, such enhancements are useless.

Imagining filling gigabytes of storage with 10MB attachments.

[strekship]

I think I have used less than 100mb in my gmail account.

[primexx]

Yea we definetly need a better way to attach files.

[luders]

I have had my gmail account maxed out for a while now. Been purging stuff each week. It will be great when google one ups yahoo like always.

[Dom]

I like how Gmail is atm, i dont see myself switching anytime soon...

[Rappy Veteran]

AOL has for a while now. Now I'm waiting on Hotmail. :)

Yeah next step has to be Hotmail...I might start using my Yahoo account if its unlimited but continue to use my gmail as my business account :D

[abdulzis]

I would rather have features like POP3/IMAP/Mobile addons like free alerts than unlimited storage

[SacrificialSoldier]

who in the world could fill up their mailbox before anyway? Oh, well, yea!!! (Y) go yahoo :punk: You da bomb!!! :D (NOT!) Gmail Rocks!

[primexx]

who in the world could fill up their mailbox before anyway? Oh, well, yea!!! (Y) go yahoo :punk: You da bomb!!! :D (NOT!) Gmail Rocks!

I believe the stats was that only 1% of Gmail users used any substantial part of their allocated storage.

[SacrificialSoldier]

that's what I thought!

[dreamz Veteran]

By contrast, when Yahoo first introduced its e-mail service a little under a decade ago, it capped individual storage at 4 megabytes per user. At that time, an "ultra high-density" floppy disk for personal computers then held 144 megabytes.

i don't remember floppy disks ever holding 144 megs.

anyway, unlimited space is nice.

[ZonoBurk]

The 1997 3?-inch LS-240 holds 240MB. I've always thought that Floppy disks held .>44MB (I think that's what he meant).

[ZonoBurk]

Here's what someone at AOL had to say.

[hahacar]

incidently the first such services are active and running successfully in india. And is called http://www.rediffmail.com and it seems to me that http://mail.yahoo.com is just copying the path of a successful enterprise.

I have written one such silly topic in my last post. If you have extra bandwidth to waste please visit...

http://ayub.blogspot.com/2007/03/storage-problems.html

-Ayub

[Rappy Veteran]

I just hope that with the unlimited space comes a bigger attachment...because as much as I love gmail it just lacks on that front :(

[Crazysah]

I totally agree there mate. How else are we supposed to send big file attachments if they dno't increase the file attachment space?

[jameseuk]

Its just a "wow look at us we are great,none of the other big players have done this" attitude,in reality have many people used near enough 3 gigs of their gmail limit or 2 gigs of their hotmail limit?,me thinks not.

I doubt Gmail & Hotmail will go unlimited anytime soon,theres really no point in them doing so.

[oceanmotion]

I would rather the likes of Microsoft to forget the storage issue and offer accounts that don't need reactivating after 30 days of no use and deletes all content. That is very annoying.

[Tokar]

I dont care about storage capacity. Give me back my Yahoo! POP3 server.

I think it would be cheaper to give back free POP3 access as opposed to unlimited space.