Yahoo to Offer Unlimited Email Storage

Josh Fink writes to tell us that Yahoo has announced that they will be offering unlimited email storage starting this coming May. The launch is all a part of Yahoo's ten year anniversary. While not all users will see their storage caps disappear right away Yahoo is promising that this feature will eventually reach their entire population.

Too bad we've already got gmail

[atomicthumbs]

I've tried Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Mail Beta. They were actually my first email accounts. Somebody sent me a gmail invite a few years ago and I've never looked back. The yahoo interface is AWFUL.

Re:Nice idea.

[icepick72]

Unlimited $1 bills, or unlimited pennies, or unlimited $20 bills, or unlimited flecks of gold ... does it really matter if indeed it is unlimited?

Re:Too bad we've already got gmail

[eln]

I actually like the old Yahoo interface: it's simple, clear, and easy to use. Also, the ads are easy to block.

The new Beta is terrible, though. It's slow as hell, and it's so cluttered with useless "Web 2.0" cruft that the actual viewing area for the message is ridiculously tiny. If they decide to switch to that format permanently, and don't give an option to keep using the old interface, I am going to have to stop using Yahoo for my email. That would really suck, since I've been using that email address for 10 years.

unlimited

[flynt]

Whenever something says 'unlimited', don't you just want to know, "What really is the limit?"

Re:Do I really need more Yahoo Space?

[rhartness]

Not really. They probably won't even increase the storage size of there servers any more than they typically do. My guess is that they've noticed that most users (probably in the neighborhood of 99.99%) aren't anywhere close to their max usage and that offering this 'feature' is good simply for advertising and attracting new customers. The really limit is the size of the individual emails themselves. If you are limited to 5MB of space/per email, you would have to have about 25k 5MB emails to fill one TB. That's not going to happen, even if your account is a ten year old spam catcher.

Re:Too Little Too Late

[imaginaryelf]

Amen. The "new" email interface is so slow and heavy.

They pulled the same to crap to tv.yahoo.com.

Yahoo should remember, "Don't fix it if it ain't broke!"

Re:yahoo e-mail addresses, the new DMZ?

[TheRealMindChild]

If Bugmenot taught me one thing, is there is always the asshole who changes the password as soon as they log in.

Spammers

[BrianPan]

I'll write the followup headline...

Yahoo to Offer Unlimited Email Storage, Spammers Rejoice

What, did they really think the users would be filling the extra space?

Re:there's always a price

[suv4x4]

i just had to switch to gmail today ,as yahoo decided to start charging £12 a year for POP access.
assholes.

Very smart move, when gmail starts charging for POP3, will you move again? You always pay, one way or the other, if you honestly believe Google will forever let you use gmail without looking at their ads or paying them something, you're delusional.

It's simple: put your mailboxes on your own domain, and pay for hosting on that domain. You pay, but you have full control over the mailboxes, and you can put a site (or sites) up without extra cost.

Re:Too bad we've already got gmail

[Seumas]

Yeah, I don't care what Yahoo! offers. It's still Yahoo! email. I know how I snicker whenever I see someone email me from a yahoo address. Having a Yahoo! email account is a lot like having one of those K-Mart $5.95 dial up internet services.

Re:Do I really need more Yahoo Space?

[suv4x4]

My point is that at least in my case, this extra storage will be just wasted.

I wonder, when we're talking about unlimited and dynamic storage, can we ever talk about "extra storage being wasted". It kinda clashes with my logical units.

They don't pre-allocate infinite number of bytes for your account, which will go "wasted".

The only thing that changes is their marketing message, nothing really goes to waste, as the usage pattern of the majority of users won't change a zilch.

Fantastic!

[CranberryKing]

Now I can procrastinate phasing off yahoo!mail even longer.

Storage doesn't matter anymore. Three features gmail has that kills yahoo!mail
1. Still force mandatory spam tags on outgoing mail.
2. Still have cap on attachment size (I want to send huge numanuma song video as attachment to the world).
3. Interface still sucks (even the beta).

Re:there's always a price

[kiwimate]

i just had to switch to gmail today ,as yahoo decided to start charging £12 a year for POP access.

assholes.

Right, imagine the nerve...they decided to start charging a nominal fee for a specific remote method of access to their otherwise entirely free e-mail service.

Fine, decide it's not worth it, either dispense with the service or graciously move to a different service. But why be petty about it and call them names?

And, as you say, there's always a price. Same with gmail. You're the consumer; decide whether the service is worth the price and act as you see fit on that basis.

Re:Too Little Too Late

[hey!]

Yahoo and Gmail have two different approaches. Yahoo tries to be more integrated from the get go. Early on they provided a combination of email, full featured PIM, on line file storage and notepad. It's actually quite a useful set of features. I also like that I can synchronize PIM data with my PDA.

Google's approach to integration is more incremental. They build an application more or less as a stand alone entity. The result is that if email is the only thing you really care about, Gmail provides a far cleaner interface.

The pitfall with Yahoo's approach is that it is inherently more complex. It doesn't help that the first versions of their beta interface were horribly slow, but the worst decision was acting as if this were the late 90s and trying to be the user's portal to the Internet. Not that there is anything wrong with trying, but when the user wants his email, he doesn't want to wait for the top stories from sports and entertainment to load. Making the user wait for content he hasn't asked for to get content he has asked for was a bad, bad mistake.

Overall Yahoo offers a better package of services. Google provides better individual services when it has a comparable offering. If you just want email, Google is the choice for you. Yahoo should be a viable alternative, but they've chosen to magnify the downsides of their offering.

Re:Usability Up, But it is slooooooow

[jimjamjoh]

It's dreadfully slow to load up, yes, because it's got so much javascript overhead on the front end. But that's a feature, not a flaw, because it's designed to just sit in a browser window/tab and never refresh the page, and once the initial loading is complete, it is MUCH faster to do repetitive email tasks, because the full page never reloads, just little pieces here and there via AJAX.

So, just like a desktop app, you sacrifice a bit in start-up time to get an app that is more responsive and allows more seamless transition between its various features.

Re:Do I really need more Yahoo Space?

[Pollardito]

They don't pre-allocate infinite number of bytes for your account, which will go "wasted".

they don't pre-allocate space, but the amount of spam that can accumulate in accounts that are effectively dead has no ceiling now. i wonder if they're limiting the amount of unread email that an account can accumulate just to give them a boundary that they can put onto accounts like that?

What does unlimited really mean?

[suggsjc]

I haven't read the article or Yahoo!'s terms of agreements, but what does unlimited *really* mean? Not that I would want to, but just say I automated a script that went around the net and automatically send email with pseudo random pics/video's/other large media as attachments. Or I sent nightly backups of my entire filesystem (I know bandwidth becomes a limiting factor, but still).

How much "stuff" do I have to start throwing in my inbox before they raise a red flag and either ban the account or throttle my upload speed? Unlimited is a tricky word. It can actually mean different things (kinda). For instance I can say I allow unlimited refills at a restaurant, but it really means unlimited for that day. When they close and reopen the next day you'll have to buy another cup to get your "unlimited" refills.

All that to say, I'm sure that somewhere there are probably clauses that will greatly restrict their definition of "unlimited." Does anyone know what/where they are?

Re:Nice idea.

[AndersOSU]

Wouldn't that only be a problem if intelligent comments on slashdot were not countable? I've been counting since sometime in 2004, and I've still got plenty of unused fingers.

Re:Nice idea.

[cptgrudge]

I've been counting since sometime in 2004, and I've still got plenty of unused fingers.

Don't be modest. Everyone likes the smell of their own brand.

Re:Nice idea.

[nine-times]

But then they'd have equal access to unlimited pennies, and they would make a similar deal with someone else to shovel the unlimited pennies. This chain would continue until everyone had access to the pennies, and because of this, the pennies would be worthless, and no one would ever shovel them.

Re:New business plan

[Tim Browse]

People still view slashdot sigs? I turned them off after the n'th movie spoiler I saw.

This Wont Work

[Velocir]

I don't think this will work. We used to have unlimited texting over here in NZ, but people were sending a 100,000 txts a month so they had to cancel the service. People have been uploading hours of video to try to fill their Gmail accounts.
People will always try to push the limits of what is possible when corporations offer them things that are supposedly unlimited...

Re:New business plan

[Lord Flipper]

There has got to be some small print. It is Yahoo!, there's just gotta be.

I don't know about 'fine print', but there is sub-text, and it goes like this: "We have the world's shittiest SPAM filtering, and, frankly, we need the space!"