On May 16, 2007 Yahoo! Mail began a global rollout of its new unlimited e-mail storage. The unlimited e-mail storage will reach users of the service within the coming months, a company release said. This is to commemorate the approaching 10-year anniversary of Yahoo! Mail.
Yahoo mail will be ten years old soon. When it launched in 1997 it included a whopping 4 MB of total storage (Yahoo! acquired RocketMail, one of the world's first webmail products, and relaunched as Yahoo! Mail in 1997). This was increased to 100 MB in 2004, and 1 GB in 2005.
"Both new and existing Yahoo! Mail users will receive an unlimited amount of free e-mail storage as long as they follow normal e-mail practices and abide by the company's anti abuse limits. The service upgrade will be available to users of the original Yahoo! Mail Service and the Yahoo! Mail Beta", company's Vice-President John Kremer said.
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). 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. With this change, Yahoo surpasses 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).
Yahoo! Mail has a good 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). Yahoo! Mail, Rediff Mail, Google Mail (Gmail)...etc. all are going towards free unlimited e-mail space. Competition drives more features for customer at free of cost. This shows how much the online advertisement earns money! As the competition grows, we can expect rollout of more new features.
"We hope we're setting a precedent for the future. Someday, can you imagine a hard drive that you can never fill? Never having to empty your photo card on your camera to get space back? Enough storage to fit the world's music, and then some, on your iPod? Sounds like a future without limits" says John Kremer, Vice President, Yahoo! Mail.
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