Yahoo breaks Storage Barrier for Webmail

Nearly quarter of a billion users of Yahoo mail services who until now were forced to delete their old mails can now keep their mails for an unlimited period as Yahoo Inc. is planning to offer unlimited storage for its free Web-based e-mail service in May, responding to rapid growth in attachment sizes as people share ever more photos, music, videos and rich media via e-mail.

Internet media company Yahoo Inc., which launched its free e-mail service in 1997 with four megabytes of storage, will provide unlimited storage space to its nearly 250 million users worldwide, in a move to outmaneuver its two largest rivals in free e-mail, Microsoft Corp., which grants two gigabytes of space on its Windows Live Mail and Google Inc., which currently provide 2.8 gigabytes of free storage on Gmail.

"We are giving them no reason to ever have to delete old e-mails. You can keep stuff forever," Yahoo co-founder David Filo said in a phone interview. "People should think about e-mail as something where they are archiving their lives," he added.

Just like Microsoft’s Hotmail, which offers one gigabyte of storage, Yahoo also currently offers 1 gigabyte of storage to its e-mail users. Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, the fourth largest e-mail provider, is already offering unlimited storage for free.

Yahoo would not remove e-mail storage limits at once rather it plans to gradually lift all space constraints in May, and it will take several months before all of Yahoo's e-mail users have boundless storage space.

"We hope we're setting a precedent for the future. Someday, can you imagine a hard drive that you can never fill?" wrote John Kremer, the vice president of Yahoo Mail, in a post on company’s Website.

Yahoo’s e-mail capacity expansion move, which is expected in advance of the launch of Apple's iPhone, also reflects the plunging cost of storage as new personal computers store up to a trillion bytes of data and the 80-gigabyte iPods can hold 100 hours of video.

In January this year at the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs showed off iPhone, a multimedia/internet-enabled phone, and confirmed that Yahoo would provide Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP)-enabled mailboxes for Apple iPhone users. The iPhone's functions include those of a camera phone, a multimedia player, mobile telephone, and internet services like e-mail, text messaging, web browsing and wireless connectivity.

Apple is scheduled to release its revolutionary iPhone in the US in late June, and in UK in October, pending telecoms regulatory approval.

When Yahoo started the service nearly a decade ago, the common mobile storage for personal computers was a floppy disk with only 1.44 megabytes capacity and Yahoo offered 4 MB storage. Yahoo was charging nearly $50 per annum for 100 megabytes of storage.

While promising the changeover to unlimited storage for Yahoo Mail users, the Sunnyvale, California based company appears to have outlined limits for how users can use the storage capacity of their mailboxes.

In his post on company’s corporate blog, Kremer noted that Yahoo has developed "anti-abuse limits" for users, however, he did not detail what those anti-abuse limits will be.