Yahoo! Mail Bests Gmail with Unlimited Storage

Over the next few months, Yahoo! Mail users will begin having unlimited storage at their disposal. From the news pieces I've come across, the attachment size limit of 10MB (20MB for Y! Mail Plus subscribers) per email hasn't changed. So much for emailing large movies of your St. Patrick's Day drinking antics to your friends... but then again that's what YouTube is for.

With the current trend of increasingly more affordable data storage, it could almost be expected that unlimited storage would be offered like this. Of course, Yahoo!, like others in the data storage industry, are well aware that only a small percentage of their users will use more than a few gigabytes. I vaguely recall a conversation with Caterina Fake where she mentioned that a infinitesimal group of Flickr users ever came close to utilizing their monthly upload limit, which was 2GB for pro users back in the day.

These Yahoo! Mail specifications will change in the coming months.

How much storage space do you use with your email account of choice? Gmail tells me I'm using "1708 MB (60%) of your 2833 MB" with 14,000 emails since I got my gmail account on June 29th, 2004 through one of those ubiquitous gmail invite swap websites from a lady in Britain who gave me an invite after I posted something about how I wasn't going to vote for George Bush. (Brits don't like him apparently?)

Oh and just to put this out there, from the best of my knowledge services like Gmail compress your emails so if you are using a gigabyte in plain text email it's only taking up something like 200-300 megs on the server.