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.

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.

yahoo the best rival for google

Good move on their part… this will surely generate a good buzz around mail users . But GMail is still the best option since i will stick to it :).

“but does not support IMAP, and POP access and forwarding are premium features (Gmail offers POP access and forwarding for free).”

POP access and Forwarding are available free of charge in certain countries.
Australia for example. (Chinese i think has something similar?)

yahoo.com (USA yahoo branch) however decided you lot should pay extra for those features.

D

I have both a Yahoo Mail account and Gmail account. Both have their benefits, however, coming from Outlook, Yahoo is far superior. Its speed has increased considerably recently. The only positives I see with Gmail are tagging and POP access. Other than that, I’ll stay with my Yahoo.

Now when it comes to Calendars, Yahoo unbelievably far behind. I hope they step up soon on this one.

I have a Yahoo! Mail account, but I never use it. Gmail is my primary e-mail account and I have had it since it first launched in early 2003. In a little over four years, I am using only 35 MB and that’s keeping every new e-mail, every reply except some spam or newsletter messages. I still haven’t reached Yahoo!’s old limit of 100 MB.

This is clearly a publicity stunt. Yahoo! Mail is a decent application, but they need to overhaul their basic, non-AJAX webmail application for users with older browsers to make it look more like its rich AJAX cousin. Plus, they need to bring the interfaces of Calendar, Notepad, and Address Book in line with Mail. And finally, what about Yahoo! 360? It’s a terrible blogging platform. Ever tried to use an implementation of Yahoo! 360 on Yahoo! GeoCities? Even if you don’t double-space your post, it ends up double-spacing it anyway so there are serious back-end issues with that. Yahoo! really needs to do something big - and I don’t mean the proverbial “they must buy Facebook for $2 billion”. No, all they need to do is buy Six Apart Ltd. That’ll give them several well known social-networking brands plus kick-ass blogging platforms in Movable Type and Vox.

Come on, Yahoo!. Spend half a billion dollars and buy Six Apart. They’ll sell. Oh, and while you’re at it, consider my earlier proposal: an all-stock merger of equals with eBay Inc. to create an Internet powerhouse to rival Google. The combined company would be called eBay Yahoo! Inc.

Cheers,
Doug

michael:

i got your twitter update (thanks!) and i have to say i am very surprised it took yahoo this long to counter. perhaps they have been drunk on the paid user accounts (i’m one - but wait, there’s more to it than big storage… like proxies - doooh, and they dont work, the primary still gets spammmmmmmed).

the fact is that they let gmail reign in this area for too long. and now google has won over a huge audience (ME) with a supurb interface and a must have domain (gmail is way cooler than yahoo or hotmail - i hate to say it but having a hotmail account is now like having an aol address and yahoo isnt far behind).

for my money, i’d say this is defensive and of marginal interest at best since most people don’t even bump up against gmail’s limits (for vast majority, 2.8gb is practically unlimited). yahoo mail has bigger problems, like the fact that its unusable on my pre-intel mac and that my parents positively HATE it - i switched them over, and they found a way to switch back and they only marginally know what a browser is…

i’d say that google only really gets pissed at their new enterprise email product being 10gb is usurped. but again, the 10gb is only part of the offering (shared calendar and kick ass docs… i barely ever touch a microsoft product any longer unless i am doing ‘pivot tables’ on excel - i.e never.) surely, google’s insane infrastructure handles this without as much as a blip on the balance sheet? it will be interesting the response. i predict they will bide their time realizing this is relatively meaningless and answering validates this move in some way.

and it still comes down to whether you believe that oddpost started with the correct approach or not, i.e. that client mail (outlook) is superior. i happen to believe that they did not, that gmail rethought the entire product the way they should have and delivered something better. yahoo was lazy when they bought them and failed to recognize it…

come on, gmail has spam too and it’s even greater than yahoo. it’s too subjective. perhaps we should all just be careful to the stuff that we subscribe to. spam is like war. it will never stop.

How is this a publicity stunt? Its wishful thinking on Yahoo’s part. It was big news when google did it with a 2GB storage because it was unheard of at that time. Y! will get nothing for it. The world has moved on a long time back…

I’m a satisfied customer of Yahoo mail. More improvements are always welcome!

um, i have a pro-yahoo (wonder who i should ask for my nice money back) as well as a gmail. toss in another, and … i do not worry about storage space. not even a teensy bit.

it’s cool, but i don’t see why anyone would consider this a competition when we can all simply have both.

i wish these folks would get it right: i have enough storage (and about 600 gigs of external storage of my own)! it’s like apple: i don’t need my ipods smaller and smaller (though for a while that was necessary) …. i want them better. better sound, better filing, tagging, you name it.

i just don’t understand the priorities out there in those beautiful geek brains these days.

People will abuse it by storing porn clips on it. I still love GMail, simply its easy way of getting my mail organized !

The G in Gmail really needs to come out soon. This unlimityed storage is not that big a deal however I agree with the article writer that Yahoo will slowly announce thta they have created (ripped off) all of gmail’s features./.. yes even the threading… after all its juts a view of the data…

I love my Gmail account on the desktop and on the phone but I use loads of google services and Its about time I had access to my reader, calendar, notebook and docs and spreadsheets all from gmail.

Also I want a completely flashbased version og gmail that looks awesome because honestly that is the only thing that is going to win the less tech savvy customers…

BTW - you yahoo mail users, how do you put up with the gigantic banners??

Yahoo = Boonch!!

Call me skeptical but when companies say unlimited, they mean “a lot but within our rules and limits”.

Look at mobile phone plans, broadband accounts, all-you-can eat places. It is always limited in the fine print.

I prefer an honest approach like Google (and Zen Internet in the UK) that specifies the limit and lets you do what you want and need.

thanks but no thanks

It’s absolutely clear that, as a number of people have suggested, the prima facie ‘unlimited’ account is absolutely possible if and only if a vast majority of people do not, in fact, use their account for more than a few MB. The cockfighting about attachment sizes, spam, and so on aside, this is a great way to get new sign-ups.

I’d guess the following - the new interface, which is so sluggish on my PowerBook that I switched back to the old interface, has not proven itself. Instead of a huge upturn in users, there has been a stagnation or even a decline against their model. They’ve run the numbers comparing the additional cost for statistically few users adding a potentially huge number of mails, compared them to the uptake rates from switching to 100MB and then 2GB, and feel its worth a bet.

The best comment above was from someone who mentioned that the ’space’ wars were now over, and differentiation would need to be via other means. Absolutely - and any company who allows integration with offline storage will be bound to do better than one who doesn’t. Until POP is easily and legally available from Yahoo, they’ll always lose that aspect of the market and be a dumping ground for peoples’ spam and one-time-only accounts.

After being a loyal Yahoo mail user for almost 9 years, I’ve became unsatisfied with the service.

* Their antispam protection system is broken. I get a lot of those “nigerian”, viagra and other spam.

* Their AJAX UI is not as intuitive as Gmail that I had to switch back to the original interface after I got lost.

* Banner Ads becomes very distracting at most (esp on AJAX UI)

I’d probably maintain my Yahoo account for other things like instant messaging. Unlimited Storage is next to impossible.. there will always be hidden limitations…

Wow I must have opened well over 100 yahoo accounts in the last 5 years just to sign up for stuff where I knew I would be getting spammed. Out of curiosity I logged into some of my first yahoo accounts and found them to be completely full of spam… now the spam can continue!

I wonder how many other people out there have yahoo accounts open just collecting massive amounts of spam.

Yahoo! does provide POP3 access for non US properties like Yahoo! UK and Canada.

I think this is very telling as to how inexpensive storage has gotten and how, after looking at a decade of user habits, Y! can gamble that offering “unlimited” storage will never end up costing them much. My Gmail is usually over 90% full and I have to backup/delete 1G or so every 6 months just to make sure it doesn’t go over.” I like Gmail and getting unlimited storage from Y! isn’t a compelling enough reason for me to switch, even though I clearly would benefit from not having to worry with storage limits. The biggest reason switching would be a pain, even if all things were equal with the UI, is the hundreds of contacts that contact me via my Gmail addy.

One feature that might induce me to make a change (or further enjoy Gmail) would be to add something to the app that takes the attachment off of the email and puts it in an “Attachments” folder for me to sort/tag/browse, etc.

Hmmm … wasn’t it Google that first promised “infinity plus 1 storage”? Wasn’t that way back on April 1, 2005? Remember how Google’s innovation shocked the stodgy old Yahoo and Microsoft and revolutionized online apps? Y and MS have been fighting to copy Google’s massive quota and speedy user interface ever since.

(Reference – http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/01/145241 )

Now, two years later, Google is at 2.8 gigs and increasing every day. Is Yahoo expecting another April 1 announcement from Google, and they’re just trying to beat them to the punch?

While I appreciate the “infinite storage”, it seems kinda like a cheap shot — Yahoo copies Google’s creative idea, pretend it’s their own idea, and announce it less than a week before April Fools Day.

C’mon, Yahoo, you can do better than that! Be original. Be innovative. Come up with your own ideas!

Hi,

Forwarding is also free of charge in Germany (Yahoo! Germany). Only requires subscription to the Yahoo! Newsletter, which actually never arrives at my email

Rock on!!!
Max

Upfront disclaimer — I work for AOL and lead the Mail Product Management & Business teams.

With all the talk about Yahoo and Gmail, I thought I’d jump in and note that AOL has offered unlimited email storage to its users since 2005. And of course, AOL Mail is free to everyone via AOL.com.

I have started drifting away from Yahoo in recent years, but I still check it everyday. This will probably not affect me much. The gmail/Yahoo wars are still interesting. I wouldn’t count out a counter measure from the big G coming very soon.

Probably Yahoo is catching up with the features but they’re far behind. And we’re all so used to GMail. The storage size is simply not the factor for me to switch back

I think it’s pointless to be honest with you. The 2.83 GB GMail gives me is just fine for email. And I just explained on my blog why Yahoo can do it, and Google can’t.

http://www.daveberube.com/blog.....ail-space/

It seems like Yahoo is going to have to add some sort of filtering/detection software to weed out the abusers. I’d be willing to bet that (like usual) 5% of their users will use up 75% of the total Yahoo storage space. Maybe they will just put in file size provisions or bandwidth access provisions.
—-
Destroyit

Unlimited or not they still have those nasty ass spam messages on the end of every email. I will be staying with Gmail.

Afroloop
+1

Hi,

I’m with AOL on the mail team. As many of you have stated here, Yahoo’s unlimited storage announcement is not a big deal because it’s not something that’s highly desired by the market. The press release was more about a pre-emptive move than substance.

I’ve also stated (http://journals.aol.com/websuiteblog/productinsider/) that AOL has had this since 2005 (albeit temporarily requiring moving emails to ’saved on AOL’), as well our plans to remove that requirement and other limitations on storage in the future.

Tae

Cool, you mean my daughters will get unlimited storage with their AIM accounts too? Ok, ok, I admit that we have AIM accounts in the family–they have better security contgrols for my family accounts than anyone else I could find.

If Yahoo got their spam under control, I’d switch back.

I suggest they should upgrade their spam filter rather than the storage. It’s more needed by the users.

Send any file with any file size to your email account with a simple right click and send file (including yahoo). With the following software you can send any file with any file size (automatic split and merge) to your email account, you can also send whole folders to your email account as it will zip them up. You can download it from http://emailer.zapto.org

I think this is more marketing hype that puts them on par with the other email services storage (i.e. Gmail 2.8g) rather than giving them a huge advantage. How many people really need or use that much space in email? I’d be interested to know what percentage of GMail users use even 1/2 of their space.

I think that Yahoo! is throwing out the term unlimited as a marketing ploy and hoping to stay ahead of the curve. There will likely be restrictions or terms of service which will redefine “unlimited”.

http://fezzie.blogspot.com/200.....liant.html

hi
i want to have unlimited mail

thanks

hi

hgh

It seems yahoo improves right when I need it to. Right when I was at the previous limit yahoo started giving 1gb free. Now, I’m at the 1gb limit and they are coming out with unlimited mail. I was this close to switching to gmail, now I’m not sure. I like that Gmail has pop3 free and @gmail just sounds cooler than saying your some yahoo.

Seriously Google already filters searches in China and thus they will continue to send your emails over to China if you use Gmail.

Yahoo is way ahead in this field.

Yahoo! mail DOES HAVE POP, I use it in my outlook and it is free too!

Each week, I probably get about 1000 spam messages in my junk mail folder in Yahoo!. In that same week, perhaps 10-15 items of SPAM make it into the inbox.

That’s pretty good if you ask me.