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

This post has been edited by webguru: May 18 2007, 01:42 AM

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

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).

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

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 .

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

This post has been edited by viettre: May 19 2007, 06:04 AM

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

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

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

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