Yahoo! goes! yahoooo! and! offers! unlimited! email!

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 28 March 2007 22:35

Your IT - Entertainment

Yahoo places faith in the gods of storage technology to help them deliver unlimited email storage forever, in a move that seemingly forces Google and Microsoft to respond in kind, or offer infinity plus one instead.

As has been noted online, the original web mail services such as Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail offered 2mb and 4mb of storage respectively, which was obliterated on April 1, 2004 by Google’s stunning offer of 1Gb of email storage space, free – with the only catch being that you needed to be invited into the beta to get access, something that was enormously successful at the time, instantly bringing an aura of mystery, desire and admiration for having so boldly changed the web mail landscape forever in an instant.

But you might be surprised to discover that Yahoo! are not the first to offer unlimited storage for email – that honor apparently goes to Rediff.com who launched a similar service earlier this year, while Google has spoken about an ‘infinity + 1’ service along with a GDrive that would store all your data.

Despite Rediff.com offering unlimited storage before Yahoo!, the reality is that most people will not know this, and Yahoo! will be remembered as the company that brought unlimited and email into the same sentence – interestingly only a few days before April 1 2007, when Google might have been expected to do something interesting with Gmail, and could well still be planning something. If that’s the case, Yahoo! clearly wanted to gain the upper hand, and given the massive worldwide free publicity this is bringing them, Yahoo! have succeeded in generating lots of attention – whether Google is doing anything spectacular with Gmail next week or not.

The announcement was made at the Yahoo! blog called ‘Yodel’ by John Kremer,
Vice President, Yahoo! Mail.

He reminisced about the old days of Yahoo! buying Rocketmail and transforming it into Yahoo! Mail in 1997, where the option of offering customers 4Mb of space each was agonized over, especially given that the original total storage limit was 200Gb, something that Kremer says Yahoo! processes every 10 minutes, although some commenters to the blog have suggested a large proportion of that is spam, and that for some of the commenters concerned, is more important to improve than offering infinite, unlimited storage.

Despite the unlimited tag, Kremer says that “We’re psyched to be breaking new ground in the digital storage frontier by giving our users the freedom to never worry about deleting old messages again. And, like any responsible webmail service, we have anti-abuse limits in place to protect our users. BTW: As much as we’d like to just flip a switch and “unlimit” everyone on the same day, we’ll be rolling this out over a few months to facilitate a smooth transition — we know there’s virtually nothing more precious than your inbox.”.

So, nice to see they want to make sure we don’t lose our emails, which is more important than ever in this digitally hyper-connected age we live in. But even if the service is truly unlimited, there are clearly going to be some kind of internal limits or settings that will trigger an internal alert should users go over them, in a bid to prevent users from uploading hundreds of gigabytes of data onto Yahoo!’s servers and ruining the system for everyone else.

Kremer says that “We hope we’re setting a precedent for the future. Someday, can you imagine a hard drive that you can never fill? Never having to empty your photo card on your camera to get space back? Enough storage to fit the world’s music, and then some, on your iPod? Sounds like a future without limits”.

That’s all wonderful, but storage is expensive, with Google and Microsoft building massive data centers all over the world, meaning Yahoo! must also be investing in and building massive storage capacity that will only have to grow and grow and grow far into the future.

How are they going to deal with this? Please read onto page 2 for the conclusion…