Yahoo Set to Offer Unlimited Email Storage

The number one email provider on the planet will offer unlimited storage by May.

At some point in May the webmail giant will completely lift personal email storage limits. This will trump Yahoo's closest competitors. Hotmail currently offers 2 gigabyte worth of storage while Google Mail holds top honers with 2.8 gigabytes of mail.

Yahoo email users had been forced to scuttle by with 1 gigabyte of storage.

Yahoo will gradually increase system resources to accommodate the May anniversary launch. This is the second email giant to offer unlimited storage. AOL ,owned by Time Warner, made the move last summer.

According to John Kremers, the Vice President of Yahoo! Mail, the company wants to change the landscape for storage in general.

"We hope we're setting a precedent for the future. Someday, can you imagine a hard drive that you can never fill," he posted on Yodel Acendotal blog.

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

The company made the call to remove limits because of plunging consumer storage cost. New computers can hold hundreds of full length films and hundreds of thousands of songs. State of the art MP3 players can carry hours of video

No limits is a stark contrast to the web pioneers humble storage beginnings. They originally offered 4 megabytes of storage per personal account

"I remember getting in a room to plan our RocketMail launch over a decade ago and worrying that our original plan of a 2 megabyte quota wasn't enough, and that we needed to be radical and DOUBLE the storage to 4 megabyte per account!" Kremers wrote.

Yahoo acquired Rocket Mail in and relaunched it under it's current name and platform in 1997.

One longtime user had this to say about the new limits. "I think it's terrific. If I am out of room on my hard drive I can just store files on my Yahoo Mail. I can remember when you had to clean out your web mail almost every few hours to make sure you could still receive messages. How wonderful to be able to hold memories forever with no worry," said Judy Jefferson a Jackson, Mississippi an office administrator.

The offer will only extend to personal users and not Yahoo's business market. China and Japan's personal customers will be excluded from the new limit. China is the most populous country in the world. The Communist country strongly limits internet activity with the rest of the world.

Sources

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