Yahoo Ups Mail to Match Google's Gig 366
Bruce Young writes "Yahoo said late Tuesday that it will provide 1 gigabyte of storage for each free e-mail account. The current limit is 250 megabytes. The expanded storage which will be available in mid-April will enable Yahoo to catch up with online search engine leader Google. "
Yahoo catch-up TODO list (Score:5, Insightful)
* remove those nasty ads
* filter spam better
* add POP3 access back (you were one of the first free online mailers with POP3, then you removed it so that people would use your crappy ad-full interface)
* (and speaking of which) improve your web interface to (at least) Google standards
When you're done, let me know and I just might give up my nice gmail account.
So "FU" Mail Plus users? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Failure is imminent. (Score:2, Insightful)
Get both, and stay out of the fray. (Score:5, Insightful)
Before you guys get in a huff about Yahoo! vs. Google mail services, it stands to reason that many of us have both, plus a hotmail account.
Yahoo upping online storage is a good thing for all of us.
competetion.. This is great (Score:5, Insightful)
Computer companies do amazing things when there is competetion..
Waste of time (Score:4, Insightful)
I personally will probably never fill 250mb, let alone a gig.
I love gmail for all its features that Yahoo just doesnt have. I love the searching through archived mail. I love the labels instead of folders. And I -love- the threaded conversation view.
Yahoo would have to come up with some pretty killer feature at this point for me to even look at it. Even if it matched the featureset, it's still slow and cluttered compared to Gmail. And even then, I trust google more with all my mail than I do Yahoo.
Basically, just upping to a gig from 250mb...I could see this maybe stopping some Joe Sixpacks who use Yahoo now from switching to Gmail, but anyone who has actually used Gmail will probably never switch to Yahoo. The goodness just isnt there.
Does 1GB really make that much of a difference? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Failure is imminent. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Yahoo vs Google? (Score:5, Insightful)
And FYI Yahoo had email before Google was even a blip on the horizon for Altavista so it more like Google are trying to beat yahoo ay their own game. Either way I dont care, I win.
Re:Google catch-up TODO list (Score:1, Insightful)
Hmm, I kinda just wanted to get my email.
Re:Pop Access? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I don't have a yahoo account... (Score:5, Insightful)
Graphic ads SUCK.
Re:Competition is a great thing isn't it? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm afraid those operating systems were halted by their own inadequacy. Microsoft won out simply because there was nothing better available. Now we have Linux, but Microsoft already had dominated teh market by the time Linux became a viable desktop OS.
Re:Does 1GB really make that much of a difference? (Score:2, Insightful)
He told me "well, maybe because they offer 1GB of space and you can search in your mail instead ordering it". At that time I was not aware of all the other features (threaded email, clean UI , no intrusive ads, labels, etc etc).
After a while I went in search of gmail only to find that you could just enter with an invitation.
I think that is what made them a lot of people to enter, it is like the "myth" surrounding them, only few know it, only fewer are into it and well, its darn cool (and you found lots of other features).
I think I have had my gmail only for 6 months, and I really love it. I automatically notified all my contacts to write me to Gmail and although I get spam (those Nigerian ppl) it never gets to my inbox.
So in my opinion google did lot of things right but one of the most important things that made people "make the change" was the myth of the invitation
Too many coincidences. (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, it's funny that they had that same quota from 1997 from then until last year when gmail's beta started growing, at which point they made it 250MB. Then they upped it to a gig - exactly what google offers - within a week of gmail's expansion to the general populace.
If you believe in that many coincidences, you must have been on the OJ jury, would explain a lot.
Re:This news means more than you think (Score:2, Insightful)
0 x 1gig = 0gigs
gazillion x 250mb = a quarter gazillion gigs.
So, maybe now that Gmail is out of beta and has a quarter gazillion customers, they have a quarter gazillion gigs too, but they definitely didn't start out using up as much storage capacity as Yahoo already was using. Google just looks faster in this case because it was able to scale, whereas Yahoo had to quantum leap.
(Note to math purists: I'm using the word gazillion-- I'm aware that I'm making hugely flawed assumptions in my math, such as not everyone using the full amount of space. I don't care.)
Re:Does 1GB really make that much of a difference? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, when GMail started, and Yahoo was restricting everyone to 6MB of space unless you paid through the nose, I imagine a LOT of people switched just because of the space. Why else would Yahoo have finally upped it's limit? They were making things smaller and smaller for quite some time now, trying to squeeze a few more dollars out of their customers.
Re:I don't have a yahoo account... (Score:3, Insightful)
Graphic ads SUCK.
Automatically reading all of your email so that Google can target text ads at you sucks even more. I'll take Yahoo's randomly-targeted graphic ads any day.
Re:I don't have a yahoo account... (Score:3, Insightful)
If you don't trust anyone to not read your email, run your own mail server.
Re:Yahoo vs Google? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So "FU" Mail Plus users? (Score:2, Insightful)
1080 free hours of . . . (Score:3, Insightful)
Once the company offers a quota larger than 99% of its users will use, then it can increase the quota arbitrarily without needing any additional resources to supply the (unused) storage space. After that, it's just a marketing exercise in using (pointlessly) inflated numbers to sell to new subscribers.