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

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 28 March 2007 23:35

Your IT - Entertainment

Still, the biggest Web mail provider in the world, Yahoo!, has re-ignited global attention to the issue of Web mail, something that has become a commodity in the modern world. This kind of attention hasn’t been since since the introduction of Gmail and the 1Gb announcement which now rests at 2.8Gb and growing, bit by tiny bit, every day, already 0.8Gb bigger than when Gmail’s capacity was doubled from 1Gb to 2.

Prior to their announcement, Yahoo! offered 1Gb of storage, while Hotmail delivered 2Gb. Interestingly, Yahoo’s email interface remains the most ‘Outlook’ like of all, but even better as it allows message tabs, as with your browser, keeping it in tune with the whole Web 2.0 ethos of better web applications that deliver desktop-like experiences, with some features even better than what is available on today’s desktop software.

Windows Live Mail, Hotmail’s replacement, also received a similar upgrade to Yahoo! Mail, while Gmail has also had some much needed minor interface tweaks (including simple access to a reply button at the -top- of an email message) along with others, but while it does need an interface refresh and the ability to have several messages open at the same time as with Yahoo, it is still remarkably and wonderfully useable and useful and up until now has remained my favorite webmail program, with only the 1Gb limit of Yahoo! Mail keeping me from making the switch.

All the while, of course, I have been using Outlook 2007 on my desktop, and could even receive email from the webmail accounts through their respecting pop3 email servers, thereby keeping a local copy of my webmail accounts should I so desire it, although I’ve actually been using my Gmail account in reverse, ensuring a copy of all mail received to my real email addresses also gets copied to the Gmail account. Then I can use the browser in my phone, or the freely downloadable Gmail Java App available for a range of phones today, to access my mail any time I want, and search through it in mere seconds without needing to boot up my PC or have a large phone.

But already, I have reached my Gmail account’s storage limit, and instead of simply opening up another account as a colleague did, transferring email to the new account and preserving  the old for searching purposes, I’ve been deleting emails – something that Yahoo! promises you no longer need to do.

You see, instead of Yahoo! just doing something ‘simple’, like offering 4Gb of email to Google’s soon-ish to be 3Gb limit, Yahoo! is clearly hoping their announcement is even more momentous than Google’s when they announced the game-changing 1Gb limit – on April Fool’s Day, to boot.

After all, it is an announcement that means Yahoo! is offering everyone unlimited storage forever.

Just as Gmail has a range of hacks and plug-ins available, letting you turn your 2.8Gb of email storage into a virtual hard drive and much more, with a list of more than 30 cool Gmail hacks listed at makeuseof.com and plenty more online (search for Gmail hacks in Google or Yahoo), we can surely see the same kind of programs becoming available for Yahoo.

If you really do have ‘unlimited storage’, there has to be a limit which triggers an alert to Yahoo!’s email administrators that a user is using a much higher level of storage than the rest of the average user base, and the challenge for Yahoo! will be managing the accounts of users who are trying to simply grab as much space as possible, simply because they can, while managing the ever growing email accounts of hundreds of millions of users, with over 257 million regular Yahoo! mail users already on the service.

Still, in the absence of a competitive response from Google or Microsoft, Yahoo!’s announcement is enough to make me think of finally using my Yahoo! Mail account instead of my Gmail account as my primary Web mail system, especially given the nicer Yahoo! interface, as Gmail’s larger storage capacity and their nice Java client for my phone are the main two things keeping me happy with Gmail’s service.

Will Google and Microsoft truly let Yahoo! have the ascendancy and the bragging rights of being the biggest Web mail provider with the most (unlimited) storage? Surely, even if they do, they won’t let Yahoo! enjoy ‘unlimited’ status for long, meaning that one day in the not too distant future, Yahoo! will have to figure out how to offer ‘infinity plus one’ themselves.

Whatever happens, and despite Rediff.com beating Yahoo! to the unlimited email storage punch, Yahoo! have proven they are still a serious competitor, contender and player in the search, email and online services worlds. All we wait for now, besides our existing account being switched over to the new unlimited status, is to see how Google and Microsoft respond, and that, my friends, sure is going to be fun to watch!