Yahoo Says No Reason For Email Storage Games: Offers Unlimited Storage

from the storage-is-cheap dept

Tue, Mar 27th 2007 11:36pm — Mike Masnick

It's been almost exactly three years since Google first announced Gmail. The massive one gig of storage surprised the world so much that many assumed it was simply a practical joke by Google. However, Google insisted that they recognized how storage was getting cheaper and cheaper, and that it simply didn't make sense to limit how much mail you could keep (in fact, for a while, it was quite difficult to delete any mail from Gmail). Of course, while 1 gig seemed nearly infinite three years ago, it wasn't long before some people noticed it still wasn't enough. So Google started a running tally increasing their amount of storage every second to try to stay ahead of the curve. The folks over at Yahoo finally realized this was silly and have decided to just ditch the limits entirely, offering unlimited email usage for everyone. Storage is cheap. Getting and keeping users are expensive. If you can use unlimited storage to get and keep users, it's probably worth it.

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22 Comments

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The Swiss Cheese Monster, 28 Mar 2007 @ 12:29am

I wish my own yahoo had unlimited storage...... I'd get more dates that way...
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Pseudonym, 28 Mar 2007 @ 12:41am

Clearly they're just offloading their email storage to the Chinese government.
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Anonymous Coward, 28 Mar 2007 @ 1:21am

Yahoo isn't the first to do so... Indiatimes.com offered unlimited storage quiet a while back and rediffmail.com did so a couple of weeks back

Its another story that both these services suck big time. Worst offender is indiatimes.com, which keeps spamming their own users.
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yossi, 28 Mar 2007 @ 1:22am

really
really, how unlimited is this?
if some one wanted to email me an encyclopedia a few times, or just be a jackass, and auto email random characters to me, I'm sure some red flag would go up at yahoo, and i'd get a complaint from them because there is no such thing as unlimited.

'gasp'
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The Grombolblot, 28 Mar 2007 @ 1:31am

Unlimited is just Perspective
If you think about it, it would take a lot of big ass emails to fill a gmail account. The fact is that gmail is, essentially, unlimited. It's just a matter of how you look at it. Would you, or I or anyone use up 2.5+ gigs under regular useage? I know I can't. Hell, with constant emailing and rather large useage, my gmail has barely even a dent in it.

I'm glad that yahoo has dropped the name game, but that's all it really is...
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ocdude, 28 Mar 2007 @ 1:49am

I have managed to fill almost half of my Gmail acc
One of Gmail's biggest promotions when they first started was "never delete another e-mail again!" Well, I did just that and I discovered about a week ago that doing so meant that I was now up to 45% of my capacity, which frightened me a little, so I went on a massive deletion spree. I got most of the way through 2005 and haven't even touched 2006. While it's cool that I can even look back that far and see what was going on with my life through e-mail (I basically live my life through e-mail, mostly due to my job), it was also piling up all those one line e-mails that were pointless like, "meet me at the metro station after work" type things.

Does Yahoo! really have unlimited storage? I highly doubt it. Will I ever use Yahoo! because it says it has unlimited storage? Nope. I do have a Yahoo! account, mostly because I wanted to use Flickr, but because they tag their outgoing e-mail with ads, I steer clear away from using their e-mail service.
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Evostick, 28 Mar 2007 @ 4:05am

Attachements
How big an attachment are you limited to?
The mail account may still reject emails over 10mb in size.
They may also place a limit on the upload capacity.
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Paul`, 28 Mar 2007 @ 4:36am

Well, lots of storage is one thing, but last time i looked at a Yahoo! page it was a minefield of ads and other annoyances, and Google isn't. I have like 2 years of usage in my gmail and I'm using under 10% of my storage.

I'll take ease of use over some storage that I'll never use up any day.
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JBB, 28 Mar 2007 @ 4:45am

Yeah, okay. Unlimited backups?
"Storage is cheap." Yeah. Backup is expensive. What do you think the chances are that they have reasonable (by which I mean multiple) backups that protect against 1) system failure 2) system corruption and 3) user error a week ago, a month ago, etc.?

Maybe email archives aren't important enough to back up... But then why are they such a 'selling' point for gmail?
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whocaresaboutyahoo?, 28 Mar 2007 @ 4:59am

Yahoo Sucks
I have a yahoo account, but only for the purpose of useing it as a dump email account. I remember two weeks after I opened my account I was getting 400 spam mails a day (which they say does not count towards your limit) but it was still a hassel to use. Although I had intended on useing the account for legit purposes, spam mail irritates me and I switched to Gmail as my main account.
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fuse5k, 28 Mar 2007 @ 5:03am

unlimited...
I highly doubt that yahoo will be offering a truly unlimited amount of storage space.

all it would take is for someone to devise a GUI that turns yahoo mail into a FTP system, and then everyone who wants it has "unlimited storage"

I highly doubt that your account would be kept for long if you were transferring 25GB plus a month
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billy, 28 Mar 2007 @ 5:18am

getlost@aol.com
I am pretty sure that there is a add-on / extension for Firefox there somewhere I read about before that allows one to use their Gmail account through FTP.
If I were to ever get said add-on, I know I could fill it up constantly and re-empty it just to transfer my files around.
Maybe I should look that up, thats a good idea ...
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Diz, 28 Mar 2007 @ 5:21am

Google offers what consumers want
Storage was never really a problem for me, the only reason I switched to gmail was for the POP3 and SMTP so I can check my email with Outlook. I wouldn't care if google only offers 100MB of storage, I would still use it for the POP3 over Yahoo.
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Joseph Durnal, 28 Mar 2007 @ 5:26am

Corporate Systems
Great, now my customers will complain, "But I can get unlimited space on Yahoo for free, why can't I get unlimited space in my Outlook at work?"
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Anonymous Coward, 28 Mar 2007 @ 5:56am

Re: Corporate Systems
I agree with your users.

The rediculous state of affairs in most business email systems is an indication that your email solution provider is holding you back, not enabling you.
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|333173|3|_||3, 28 Mar 2007 @ 6:06am

Doesn't that already exist for Gmail? Since they both use a standard email interface, it should not be too hard to modify the gmail fiel transfer apps for Yahoo!, since I would imagine that a large part of the porting work would be in making sure that the messages were the right size.

Making such a program could be as simple as adding a file browser and ASCII buffering code tot Thunderbird. If Yahoo! mail uses 8-bit text or Unicode then the ASCII buffer would not be needed either. THe only tricky part would be allowing folders ont he Yahoo! mail end, but the obvious way to do that would be to have a directory path in the subject line, which a GUI displays as a tree.
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Overcast, 28 Mar 2007 @ 6:41am

Day late and a dollar short? lol
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TheDock22, 28 Mar 2007 @ 6:55am

Re: Re: Corporate Systems
The rediculous state of affairs in most business email systems is an indication that your email solution provider is holding you back, not enabling you.

Most businesses host their e-mail internally rather than rely on providers. Also, most business do not have the resources that Yahoo! or Gmail has to be able to offer unlimited e-mail.

As a Sys Admin, you really have no idea what your talking about in terms of cost alone.

As far as Yahoo!, they DO have the money and resources to offer such a service. It doesn't really matter though, I use Yahoo! and Gmail and while Yahoo! might have ads, their spam feature actually works when you tell it something is spam! I've been getting the same spam mail from the same person for years with Gmail, even though I told it to mark as spam. Gmail's interface is WAY nicer than Yahoo! though and I love the module for your Personalized Homepage so I can see my e-mail.
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Joseph Durnal, 28 Mar 2007 @ 8:35am

Re: Re: Corporate Systems
They would complain a lot more if we said, sorry, nobody can use their mail because we ran out of space.

It is mostly a funding thing, most corporate systems are using MS Exchange, which is pretty good on features, but not so cheap when it comes to storage requirements (2007 is a bit better). There are alternatives, but they often don't satisfy all of the end user requirements because most are so used to using Outlook, the requirements become, it has to work just like Outlook! Often the alternative is a secondary system on lower end storage for e-mail archiving, which is OK for most, but still don't exactly come cheap.
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Chris, 28 Mar 2007 @ 10:54am

When
when is this going to happen? i'm logged into Yahoo now and it still says i have 1 gig of storage. Also, when is Yahoo going to make it so that when I email notes to myself from work that those emails don't end up in my spam box? i mean come on, shouldn't the address know that when it sends something to itself it's not spam?
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SailorAlphaCentauri, 28 Mar 2007 @ 11:26am

May...
is when the article says unlimited storage will begin. My email account has been with Yahoo ever since they bought Rocketmail (which gave more storage space than Yahoo did back in the day) & it's my oldest email account. Having unlimited storage is all fine and good (I'm only just at 9% full), but I'd rather have more filtering options than the 15 slots they give you in the free account. That would be worthwhile & make it easier to capture messages that may get sent to my Spam folder (which, admittedly, was partly my fault; I marked some messages as Spam several years ago by accident & had to put in filters to catch them again).

And considering that I only use Google when I really, really have to, I won't be getting a Gmail account to add to the 10 others that I have out there. Yes, I collect email addresses like baseball cards, but some of them are Spam dumpsters and others are to allow me to say crap & still be able to get a job down the road.
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Ayyappa, 3 Apr 2007 @ 9:29pm

Regarding Storage
Because of this evolution in storgae the need of space and usage of space has been increased
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