As people's inboxes continually expand, e-mail providers have been trying
to outdo each other to stay on top of the (literally) ever-growing market.
That's why, on the verge of the 10-year anniversary of the service, Yahoo!
Mail will no longer have a storage limit as of this coming May. Yahoo! Mail vice president John Kremer announced the decision in a blog
post early this morning, writing that their users now have the "freedom
to never worry about deleting old messages again."
Previous to this announcement, Yahoo! Mail's limit was 1GB, bumped up from
100MB in 2005. The move to 1GB of storage was made mostly to stay in competition
with Gmail, which was the new kid on the block and also touted 1GB of storage
at the time. This was leaps and bounds ahead of nearly all other web mail providers,
and services like Yahoo! and MSN Hotmail were struggling to find ways to stay
competitive.
Since then, Gmail has bumped up its storage space once again, to 2.83GB "and
counting... you'll never need to delete another message," which seems
to be Google's way of indirectly saying that their service also offers unlimited
storage space. Although Kremer told
Reuters that the reason for the upgrade was because of the increasing size
and volume of rich media files and photos in their users' inboxes, it would
be hard to believe that a major factor in the upgrade isn't once again tied
to Google's seemingly endless resources. It's unclear at this time whether
Yahoo! Mail will enforce individual file size limits as Gmail currently does.
Yahoo! wants to make clear, however, that this new unlimited storage option
is not without guidelines to protect against abuse. The web mail service is
meant for personal use, says the company, and will not tolerate spammers.
And Kramer doesn't want Yahoo! Mail users to get all worked up over a specific
date when a switch might be flipped: "we'll be rolling this out over
a few months to facilitate a smooth transition," he writes.
Kremer goes further in his blog post and alludes to a "future without
limits," fantasizing about hard drives that can never be filled and photo
cards that never need to be emptied. And indeed, Yahoo! co-founder David Filo
told Reuters that the company is considering lifting storage limits on its
other services, namely their popular photo-sharing service, Flickr. "We
are looking at those on a case-by-case basis," he said.
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