Yahoo to Offer Unlimited Email Storage

Yahoo Inc. announced on Tuesday that it plans to offer unlimited email storage to its quarter of a billion email users.

The worlds biggest email service is doing away with its free email storage limit of one gigabyte due to the explosive growth in attachment sizes as people share more files than ever through email.

Microsoft currently has a 2 gigabyte free email storage limit. Google's Gmail offers 2.8 gigabytes of free email storage.

"We are giving them no reason to ever have to delete old e-mails," Yahoo co-founder David Filo said in a phone interview. "You can keep stuff forever."

Officials with Yahoo say the decision to remove email storage limits shows the dropping cost of storage as new personal computers can store up to a trillion bytes of data. Owners of 80 gigabyte iPods can carry 100 horus of video in their pockets.

When Yahoo first introduced its email service about a decade ago, it had a storage limit at under 4 megabytes per account.

"People should think about e-mail as something where they are archiving their lives," said Filo, who remains active in managing technical operations at the Sunnyvale, California.

The changeover to unlimited storage should take about a month, and will start in May, according to John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail. Not everyone will receive their unlimited storage at the same time.

The only exception for the Yahoo announcement is that the offer is for personal use only and no one can build a business by giving away unlimited storage to others using Yahoo Mail.

Two countries are excluded, China and Japan.

"We will continue working with these markets on their storage plans," Kremer said in a statement.

Yahoo is a minority owner with Softbank in Yahoo Japan Corp. and is part owner with Alibaba of the Yahoo service in China.

According to Filo, Yahoo is looking at lifting its caps on email storage for other services like its Flickr photo service.

Yahoo acquired RocketMail in 1997 and relaunched it as Yahoo mail. At the time it was a big deal to give away 2 megabytes.

Yahoo's announcement ups the ante for Google, who introduced its Gmail service a couple of years ago offering what at the time was an unprecedented amount of storage at one gigabyte. Google's Gmail service has steadily risen its storage capacity over the years and now sits at almost three gigabytes of email storage.

Sources:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,262021,00.html
http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2007/03/28/yahoo_to_offer_unlimited_e_mail_storage/
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/03/28/HNyahoounlimitedstorage_1.html