Yahoo is announcing that 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). With this change, Yahoo leapfrogs Gmail (2.8 GB and growing) and Live.com Mail (2GB). Though Rediff.com (Rediffmail), primarily an Indian mail service went the unlimited way earlier this month. 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).

A recent study by JuxtConsult did reveal some interesting findings, but it did note that though Yahoo Mail was still comfortably the leader in India – though Gmail was definitely catching up.

When Yahoo! Mail launched 10 years ago, users got 4MB of storage for their entire mailbox. This was still pretty considerable in those days. These days an MP3 song would be a enough to fill that space up.
In 2004 they increased the inbox size to 100 MB, and 1 GB in 2005.

Infact I still keep my 9 year old email iD at Yahoo active by logging in every second month, only to shudder seeing the astronomical figure of junk mails in the inbox!

Well Yahoo does have an abuse policy - which requires users to follow “normal email practices” and not engage in activities like using Yahoo mail for basic online storage.

I guess it is only a matter of time before Gmail follows suit and all others do the same too. Imagine having a hard disk drive which you can never completely fill up!

Yahoo would be looking at maintaining its lead over Gmail and I’m sure we’ll see some more additional features soon..

Credit: TechCrunch

Bookmark this post to: