Yahoo Mail Going Unlimited

[webguru 0]

Yahoo is expanding its offer of unlimited e-mail storage worldwide.Yahoo! Mail has begun its rollout of unlimited e-mail storage, which will reach all users of the service within the coming months.Yahoo announced its unlimited storage plan for U.S. residents back in March. Yahoo Mail originally launched in 1997 with 4MB of storage. The mail app was an outgrowth of Yahoo's acquisition of Four11 Corporation, which owned an app known as RocketMail.Both new and existing Yahoo! Mail users will receive an unlimited amount of free e-mail storage. The service upgrade will be available to users of the original Yahoo! Mail service and the Yahoo! Mail Beta.source :news.com.com/2100-1038_3-6171111.html

Edited May 18, 2007 by webguru (see edit history)

[patronus4000 0]

Hah! Now look who's better with mail storage! XD Back then, GMail had the largest storage space - 2GB; it was the email service everyone wanted. And Yahoo! now has unlimited storage. Awesome. This should make people love Yahoo! even more; it has a great mail service (even without the unlimited storage) and all the other services that come with your account.

 

One question: will this feature actually be "used"? I mean, right now, I've only used 1% of the alloted storage space in both my Yahoo! and Windows Live Mail accounts. I haven't as of yet seen anyone fill up their inbox with so, so many emails and attachments that they fill their inbox to the brim (unless their storage space is 50MB or something like that).

 

Serena

[bluefish1405241537 0]

It seems like an opportunity for a "Yahoo drive". Though I imagine they would take steps to prevent that (and they already have with limited attachment sizes).

[WeaponX 0]

Don't know why, but I have always like Yahoo mail over the other email services. Great to hear that they will be providing unlimited space. Probably will go to the long time members first

[iGuest 3]

Offering unlimited email storage space is certainly a generous offering. I won't argue that. But being the cynic I am, I'd like to tackle this from a different perspective, namely Yahoo's

 

The Web Hosting market is all too familiar with the claims of unlimited space. I'm sure each and every one of us has seen at least one hosting service provider claiming that it offered unlimited hosting space, whether as a free or a paid service. Unfortunately, most of those providers have gone out of business, most likely due to their lack of proper business sense. Their failure implied that the notion of "unlimited space" or "unlimited bandwidth" or "unlimited anything" is a surefire way to go bankrupt. But if you think about it, unlimited space on the Internet is not such a far-fetched notion. It's not even that risky!

 

Let's move the example to Yahoo. They've been offering 1 GB email accounts for a while now. I have no doubt many of us took them up on that offer and have been using Yahoo Mail accounts for a while now. And I'm willing to gamble good money that no one has ever gone over the 500 MB limit . Heck, the majority probably uses less than 20% of the space they have now.

 

And, of course, Yahoo knows this. They understand that at least 80% of its mail users will never use more than 20% of their storage space (the old 80-20 rule of Pareto's ). So why not offer their users "unlimited" space? Yahoo knows for a fact they don't really have to worry about that, and it sure will look so cool to their users. Plus, even if more people started using their storage spaces, storage devices are getting bigger and cheaper by the day.

 

Please understand that I'm not saying that Yahoo is pulling a cheap trick or anything. Of course not. Actually, they have good business sense. And that alone is reason enough for me to trust their durability... if over a decade of operation and billions of dollars of venture capital hadn't convinced me already, that is .

[viettre1405241546 0]

I Don't know why, but I have always like Yahoo mail over the other email services yahoo will unlimited

Edited May 19, 2007 by viettre (see edit history)

[miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG 0]

I so totally agree with Teem here. Personally, I'll always stick to Gmail coz of their lightweight service / interface. To me speed and ease-of-use has always been of primary essence. I never really got into using Yahoo coz of their bulky interface - and don't think even the lure of the so-called "unlimited space" can force me to reconsider my decision. I'd prefer the simplistic interface of Gmail anyday over the ad-laden juggernaut of Yahoo.

 

Since I started using Gmail (well over past 2 years) - I've been saving loads and loads of emails, which I would otherwise have booted out long back. Even then I've barely reached 15-17% of the 2.08GB capacity. I don't really see the "unlimited space" being a major determinant factor in drawing new customers... at least not for the tech / number savvy ones. But then of course, there's a whole segment of net users who'd want to boast their "unlimited" accounts....

 

Maybe Yahoo will pull this off.. maybe not

[jumbo1405241546 0]

When does this begin?After this thing comes out, a lot of hackers are going to try to spam. Uploading tons and tons of Terrabytes into Yahoo mailboxes. I do hope Yahoo put some spam control on that. lol

[xboxrulz1405241485 0]

Thing is, usually unlimited storage means overselling. However, looking at Yahoo's reputation and profile, I think they have almost unlimited resources to make sure that they don't oversell.xboxrulz

[iGuest 3]

Thing is, usually unlimited storage means overselling. However, looking at Yahoo's reputation and profile, I think they have almost unlimited resources to make sure that they don't oversell.

The funny thing is, Yahoo! doesn't even have to have unlimited resources to pull this off. They simply rely on the fact that people require relatively "limited storage space" from their email.

 

We can look at it this way: today, 80% of all email users can fill 1 GB of email storage space (which is a serious exaggeration). Let's say that, 5 years later, 80% will fill 50 GB! THAT's when Yahoo! might start facing trouble. Their claim of "unlimited storage space" will be put to the test then. But then again, in 5 years, storage devices will have been much bigger and much cheaper, so 50GB then could very well be compared to 1GB now. And Yahoo would still be safe

[WeaponX 0]

When does this begin?
After this thing comes out, a lot of hackers are going to try to spam. Uploading tons and tons of Terrabytes into Yahoo mailboxes. I do hope Yahoo put some spam control on that. lol

From the source link that was posted earlier, it should be deployed during this month (May). So most likely they will work their way gradually to all Yahoo Mail users by this month's end.

[lonelym 0]

Yeah. You will notice in quantcast (a site rater) that Yahoo has around 65m views per day. It's the number one site (2- google), and now they are expanding their mail to unlimited storage. God, talk about killing competition. o_O

[pyost 0]

Very unprofessional, if you ask me Sure, this "trick" might do well with Internet rookies (those that don't really know how it all works), but some more advance users will immediately realise this is overselling. Not having unlimited storage for is not what will lure them away from using Yahoo, but the fact that they are resorting to lies. I'm in no doubt that Yahoo! will be able to support all that mail, as only a handful of people will user over a few hundred megabytes worth of e-mail.

 

Google has had a storage limit ever since (though it is increasing constantly - neat move), and they've never had competition, as I can see it. What's more, I find it hard to believe that a GMail user will switch to Yahoo just because of this. As miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG already mentioned, GMail is fast, secure, lightweight and easy to use, in contrast to Yahoo, which is... Bulky. We can just hope that new users will be directed to GMail as well

[mvs.en 0]

Just to toss a quick point in here that's likely been mentioned already...As I mentioned in another thread, I use Thunderbird to view all my email...And anyone else who does do this... Server Email Storage is pretty much completely useless.Email clients that download the messages off the server and onto your computer, it instantly no longer matters how much email storage you have on the actual server since all emails are now being stored directly on the computer.And, even on a totally other note:Before I started deleting emails off the Gmail server and just purely downloading them to Thunderbird, I never deleted anything at all.For about a year and a half my exponentially increasing email count was being added onto the Gmail server, it went well past about 3,000, I think...Anyway... I tihnk I was at about 4% of my total storage space..So, where is the real need for unlimited?The only way to even really fill up Gmail is if you send alot of programs/powerpoint documents/movies/music/lots of picuters/etc. But instead of keeping all those files on the server long enough to actually fill up the inbox, you might as well find somewhere else to upload them, or just download them to your computer and then remove them from the server.Anyway, just wanted to add in my argument.I think that even Gmail's 2gig storage is a little bit unneede for emails.I was fine with Hotmail's old, really small amount of storage, the only reason I even even converted to gmail is cause it woludn't let me configure Hotmail to work with Thunderbird or Outlook like I wanted to make it do.

[xerxes1405241546 0]

I think that we're taking a bit wrong approach. We all judge yahoo's move as a plain marketing trick. Pause for a moment and take a look at it from a different angle, the angle of google.com. For years the company has been enhancing its otherwise basic service (internet searching) with multiple other (useful) features - translations, maps, office software, and now the brilliant e-mail service. Up and till now the approach worked flawlessly, with company's value and number of users rising even higher, which seemed impossible after achieving the status of (one of) the best search engines ever. And yet they are about to introduce new features (automatic translation of search queries, default searching in book, movies and pictures databases + revamped interface), constantly adapting, being the topic of media news all the time.Now, let's get back to yahoo. It's one of the biggest e-mail providers, they have a news portal, and...? I don't know about you, but for me yahoo got a bit dusty over the years, and we all know that who doesn't move forward, stays behind. Now, with google growing in power, and yahoo not looking forward to loose its market share they've adopted a new strategy. The only strategy that enables them to fight with google - the exactly same strategy of development. Let's hope unlimited e-mail is just a prelude to unlimited file storage, and even then it's a first step on a longer road. Don't get me wrong, I don't favour yahoo, especially that I hate big, bloated, and slow software, but who knows what may happen if google kills his competition and none remains...