Yahoo is announcing that all Yahoo Mail users will have free unlimited email storage starting in May 2007. The current storage limit is 1 GB per account (2 GB for $20/year premium users). With this change, Yahoo leapfrogs Gmail (2.8 GB and growing) and Live.com Mail (2GB). Yahoo mail currently has 250 million global users, more than any other online service (Live.com has 228 million and Gmail has 51 million users). See this feature by feature comparison of the services for more information.
I spoke with Yahoo’s Vice President of Mail, John Kremer, this afternoon about the announcement. He says the new storage limits (or rather lack of a limit) affect all Yahoo mail users, not just users of the new beta product.
Users are subject to Yahoo’s abuse policies, which requires users to follow “normal email practices” and not engage in activities like using Yahoo mail for basic online storage (a number of services have popped up to help people use Gmail for this purpose). Abusive accounts will not be summarily deleted - users will be notified by Yahoo and/or accounts suspended, but users will still have access to the data.
Kremer says they want their customers to be satisfied and happy with the new unlimited storage feature. Users who have paid $20 to upgrade to a premium account to get 2 GB of storage will be able to get a refund if they request one.
Interesting historical information: Yahoo mail will be ten years old soon. When it launched in 1997 it included a whopping 4 MB of total storage. This was increased to 100 MB in 2004, and 1 GB in 2005.
Is Yahoo Mail now the best webmail product? Not in my opinion, even with this announcement. It has the best and fastest user interface (although many users prefer Gmail), but does not support IMAP, and POP access and forwarding are premium features (Gmail offers POP access and forwarding for free). Gmail also allows tagging of emails, a feature I find extremely useful for organizing archived mail. Still, the Yahoo Mail team seems up for a fight, and their massive lead over Gmail isn’t going anywhere soon. My bet is that more features are coming soon.
Update (related): Good post by Zoli on how to move all of your archived mail into Gmail.
Awesome!!
I never thought there’d be a decent incentive to switch back go Yahoo! Mail after quite a few years.
What are the per message size limits?
How do we use this in any worthwhile way except long term email archival?
Good move on their part… will generate some good buzz. But GMail is still the best option out there.
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You weren’t kidding with your twitter heads up! Google is going to be pissed… nah.. just break off a few more storage servers! It’s not like they are lacking cash or anything.
Rex
It can’t be truly “unlimited”, or can it? Can I dump 2 terrabytes of attachments in there? 4? 100?Terra terrabytes?
Hmmm… interesting, but is it sustainable? Even Google slowed their plan to allow for infinitely increasing storage space …
interesting well Gmail is still more useful to me and I never use it’s 3 GB of space…however this is very interesting!
Very nice indeed. I’d love to see how Google responds.
Though, of course, probably 50% of gmail users don’t even break that 2.8 gig limit…
…and yet another nice move and wise decision by a company that often doesn’t get the innovation and creativity credit it deserves…
Interesting move - and will definitely generate buzz.. but I’m sticking with gmail. I will definitely be interested to see what Google does in response to this though!
Don’t think the move can sway gmail users, however it could be just enough to keep Yahoo! users. Gmail needs to do something different to close the gap (50M vs 250M)
I posted my thoughts (click my name) and overall I think this is a good move. Let’s just hope it’s not another Comcast.
I have some questions based on Mike’s (or John’s) comments about using it as online file storage.
4 MB back in 1997? I could have sworn it was 6 MB.
Hey if there are any TechCrunch users into fantasy baseball i’m looking for some players for the free league I set up on Yahoo. Figured i’d see if any fellow Technies wanted to play some fantasy baseball.
If you want an invite send me an email at the following address and i’ll send you a Yahoo Sports invite:
gocards757 AT yahoo.com
Interesting. I wonder if google will reciprocate?
Wow. Good timing for Yahoo. Gmail was down ALL day for me today.
(and yes I was really pissed)
It’s simple. Gmail will also announce unlimted email space soon. Watch that space. Why? Cos’ most people will still not use more than 3GB space in their lifetime.
And of course, you dont want to upload large files up Gmail/Yahoo as 2nd storage - to maximize the space (un)limit - in case your account is deleted mistakingly or your box is hacked for some reason.
Unlimited email space is simple. It means you will never need it….so this is some nice publicity stunt. Am I right John@Yahoo ?
Considering the huge outage gmail experienced today for it’s premium, free hosted, and gmail.com users — it’s definitely a good move on Yahoo’s part.
Gmail’s generic response to the issues linked below. Don’t let their wording fool you though, this was a wide-spread issue:
http://groups.google.com/group.....2fd77adb3b
Great news…but not sure what do with all that capacity. Also I thought using Yahoo mail for anything outside of personal was a no no…have things changed?
Yahoo actually *lowered* the capacity to 2MB for new accounts sometime around the year 2000 or 2001. I believe was still the capacity for new accounts when GMail came out with 1000MB in 2004
except in the minds of goog fanboys, gmail isn’t losing the email race, it has lost the email race both in terms of quality and audience. yahoo mail is a better product with 5x the userbase. only reason to use gmail is if your address is sergey@gmail.com…
Interesting, very very interesting. I’m a gmail slave. I’m going to at least take another look at Yahoo mail though.
There - beat that!
The “email storage” war is over. After Yahoo’s move, there’s nothing to compete for anymore in this area. Whomever wants to differentiate from the rest will have to do it based on other terms. I wonder what will be the next thing for which competing becomes obsolete.
Gmail doesn’t support IMAP, they do POP.
yahoo reads your email
the email storage war was over a long time ago.
99.9% of users don’t need all that storage, much less email tagging, or any of the other “differentiator features” that have been introduced.
unlimited storage really doesn’t mean that much when there’s an attachment limit of 15MB.
this is a pr move, folks, nothing more.
You know… ‘unlimited’ is a bit of an over exaggeration.
I’m sure they’d be plenty mad if I setup a script to write to a yahoo mail account and then ran…
cat /dev/random | ymail
Hm….. I wonder if I could use yahoo pipes for this. There needs to be a /dev/random yahoo pipe!
Kevin
Yahoo! does support IMAP, you just have to use the mobile client. Not a bad alternative if you use the web client for PC and the phone for on the go. But I get your drift. How about push IMAP like they said for the iPhone for everyone, regardless of client?
Unlimited + IMAP + better UI (IMHO, obviously) + Google’s many recent outages?
Granted, I only use gmail for throwaway accounts, but I’ll give Yahoo a try…
I actually had an account during their first year, and for a while it was 6 MB (while everyone of my friends were getting 4 MB). the only cool thing about it now is its a 4 character user name (which Yahoo no longer allows), of course it gets inundated with spam everyday, and at this point all I ever use it for is for creating accounts for services I don’t intend on using more than once.
I only use gmail (including for my domains) but I’m not anti-yahoo. In fact I sympathise with the company. The only reasons I use gmail over yahoo’s is the obtrusive amount of ads in the yahoo mail (both in beta and normal), and the better interface of gmail Yahoo beta looks like…a mail client…
You mentioned that Yahoo! Mail is the fastest out there. I have to disagree with that. Yahoo! Mail has been the slowest turtle for me. As for GMail, the max wait time for me is five seconds. I guess it really depends on the user.
As for unlimited storage, this is an awesome move by Yahoo! mail. I switched over the Gmail because I was looking for a simple interface, but not because of the space. Yahoo! mail has too many features I’ll never touch.
Great move indeed. I have put my thoughts here, earlier today on this.
http://alpesh.nakars.com/blog/.....unlimited/
Cheers!
Nice move! But no matter whatever they do, I won’t stop using Gmail. I hate Yahoo! Mail because of all those banner advertisements.
Mike,
Correction:
Yahoo Mail started with 6MB in 1997 and changed it to 4MB for new users in 2002 –> http://news.com.com/2100-1023_3-5233594.html
If you live in China, they will hand over your mails to the authorities.
what’s next? YahooDrive?
YahooDrive + internet 2?
Kevin:
I think you missed the apart about abuse in Mike’s post.
What about the attachment size limit? Unlimited storage with a 10MB file limit is like drinking from a keg with a straw.
interesting. what’s next? they are 35 (according to my memory) on Wired’s top 40 and google’s no 1. lets hope panama does more magic that a simple gmail revolution
Gmail also uses secure authentication over POP, which is nice. I’ve been slowly transitioning from Yahoo since I got my invite on day one.
I am already using Yahoo mail as a dumping ground of garbage. I forward my Gmail mails to it. With this new feature, yahoo mail will truly become one which I would open once in a while to clean up
This is awesome! Now I can store an UNLIMITED amount of spam. That is all anybody gets on yahoo right? I am quite certain at one point or another Yahoo was selling our address because I receive an ungodly amount of junk every day. I pretty much just use it when people ask for my email address for no good reason.
Unlimited does sound nice but as mentioned in the comments, its not truly unlimited. Users simply wont upload important data in the fear of their account being terminated. Definitely, news generating announcement though.
Rediff (www.rediff.com) did this just recently and may be Yahoo! was replying them back.
This is such a sorry move… Yahoo just proved that it just cannot innovate. Seriously, why does anyone need more than 2GB of storage for an email?
This is very good news, its better to have the storage and then not have much to do with it rather than not have the storage in the first place. Once in a while you need this huge amount of storage. Good move.
Yahoo mail is the WORST, I never use my yahoo account, and yet i have 50 emails from nigeria all wanting me to help them out. None of these are spam messages either. I want to use yahoo for its unlimited email, and its new yahoo to go.
But, they gotta fix the spam.