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.
I have a google hosted solution, which I’ve paid 50$ to get upgraded to 10GB, and as I currently only use 1,4GB of it I won’t be needing space anywhere in the nearest future. It also allows me to get rid of ad’s in my mailbox interface.
I’m just using 140MB on GMail, that’s about 2200 Emails but I don’t really know since when I have my account, must have been some times in 2005 as far as I can remember.
Those unlimited email providers just want to get some attention, because no one in the world gets that many emails and sending a movie over email isn’t any fun.
Greetings
“…Bests Gmail…”?
You mean “Beats”?
i wonder what yahoo plus users will get extra now? currently have 2gb storage but will expect some extra feature now if there is unlimited storage.
although the pop mail features, archiving and no adverts are worth the $20 a year.
Yawn. Get POP and IMAP yahoo. Oh yeah, and allow me to host my mail.macupdate.com email on your system for free too. :) Goog wins (outside of subscriber numbers).
Josh, “bests” means to defeat or one-up.
That did not talk! Gmail the best from the best..
Most people will not use even 100M that is why they are offering unlimted space. It is the same when ISPs started to offer unlimted bandwith plans.
I wonder if Yahoo! had more people join Flickr when they changed to unlimited and as a result are looking for more people to switch to Yahoo! Mail. If I understand correctly, Yahoo! dominates the world in number of email account users (correct me if I am wrong).
I also read that Yahoo! will be refunding its Yahoo! Plus subscribers who no longer wish to have the Plus account because the storage is no longer an issue.
I am still waiting for Gmail to offer IMAP.
I knew that George Bush post was a paid post! ;-)
@Jerry, heh. that was before I had a blog and I merely made that comment to get a gmail invite. =)
you know.. all allegiances to the big G and big Y aside, this is undeniably a REALLY interesting development. It was only a matter of time before someone began to offer “unlimited” storage, and its impresive that Yahoo! took it upon themselves to do it first, considering their large established userbase.
The questions standing out in my mind are -
1 - Is this “real” unlimited where users will define the upper limit, or is this invisible preset Comcast unlimited.
2 - How aggressive will they be with the abuse of this system? Inevitably, it will come up. People are already frothing at the mouth for some sort of Y!drive script. The ability to store this amount of data on a infrastructure as solid as Yahoo’s will open up potential for a lot of mash-ups.
And for the record, people need to shut up about “1 gig is plenty for me, I’ll never need more.” Those people are either severly short-sighted, or severly ignort, or (even worse) both. Ignoring the great (possibly false) quotes from people like Bill Gates (”640k will be more than enough for anyone…”), there is no way to anticipate were the internet is headed. It’s so fast, so big, so cool.
/geek rant.
911 MB (32%) of your 2833 MB with 10,000 emails since June 14, 2004.
I really like the new Yahoo Mail beta and want to switch…but switching is so hard.. Gmail is nice and all, but its just getting old and hasn’t improved at all.
@ryan
I agree with you that gmail has been slow to improve. It had a strong start out of the gate, but I’d really like to see more tie-ins with the other Google Offerings. While Gmail *sometimes* auto-detects apointments, how hard would it be to display a little agenda listing on the left of the screen.
And also, what about Google Reader? At least a link at the top with the other services if not full integration. It’s part of my communication workflow, so why isn’t it with the other updates.
That said, I’m still not convinced that yahoo is the -better- solution. It’s just good that they are keeping everyone on their toes.
187 MB (6%) of your 2835 MB with 1866 messages since June 16, 2004.
If only spam counted on that list heh.