Yahoo will offer an infinite mailbox
It’s hard for me to understand this trend. Yahoo just announced that their Yahoo mail service will offer unlimited storage for your incoming emails. It was started by Google, which launched one of the first freemails with 1 GB and kept increasing this space until now. Gmail was quickly followed by wide range of other more or less known email providers, but almost none of them gained more popularity from this step – it is way more about the user interface of your mailbox and additional services than gigabytes of storage, which noone uses anyway. According to Reuters, officials said the decision to remove e-mail storage limits reflects the plunging cost of storage as new personal computers store up to a trillion bytes of data and owners of 80-gigabyte iPods can carry 100 hours of video in their pockets.
“People should think about e-mail as something where they are archiving their lives,” said Filo, who is still active in managing technical operations at the Sunnyvale, California-based company and carries the honorific title of Chief Yahoo. ahoo is aiming to have all of its e-mail subscribers “upgraded” within a month, except for China and Japan. “We will continue working with these markets on their storage plans,” John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail, said. “We have been closely monitoring average usage. We are comfortable that our users are far under 1 gig(abyte), on average,” Kremer told Reuters by phone . “What we see are an increasing number of rich media files as consumers send more photos.” The Terms of Use will be renewed with this occasion, forbidding any regular user to offer Yahoo space for business purposes, as it is intended only for personal use only. By the way, do you know that sending 100 pictures from your last vacation in 20 MB email is really really lame? This service was never developed for such a huge transfers, and you have 1000 better options to share your photos different way with Flickr, Photobucket and all others…
Comments(26)
This is a really stupid idea, who will spend his life uploading his HD to his mail account??? in an age of DVD burners and huge HD’s who needs a backup on the net???
i will stick on my own domain email address…
Lior: not mentioning the fact they surely DON’T have infinite hard drives in their servers
it says there that on avarage users are using far less than 1GB. they are relying on that so they don’t actually need infinite storage space. sure there maybe a bunch of users who will really test those limits, only time will if it will become a problem. anyway yahoo did this just as a gimmick (much like google when it announced the 1GB way back). avarage user will continue to use his mail account just as before.
This works on the same principle as your connection from your ISP.
Say you and I live on the same street. They sell me a 10 meg connection and sell you a 10 meg connection, even tho their line can only handle 15 megs at a time.
They do this because they assume not everyone will use all of the b/w all of the time (WRONG MUHAHAHAHAH)
Same goes for “unlimited” space. There is no such thing as unlimited harddrive space. They can only do this assuming not everyone will actually USE all the space provided.
When I first got my gmail account it took DAYS to fill it (scene packed .rars in email after email)and yes, on day 1 you could actually store a full gig of data there.
The fact is for yahoo, this is too little too late and a wasted venture. 4 years ago this would be big news, but as today microsoft is about to launch 2gig livemail accounts and such, who cares?
Next month someone will offer unlimited storage +1 meg so whatever.
Re: Lior
Yeah… I could sure use that!!!! Finally I will be able to upload all my movies to yahoo instead of putting them on my hdd s which are all filled up. High five!
“Next month someone will offer unlimited storage +1 meg so whatever.”
phishy rulez
you have something called Gmail drive, so you can use your account as a virtual drive in ‘My Computer’. Works awesome. It’s time someone makes a yahoo-version then!
I’d love a YSpace Firefox extension for this, that way when I share music with a friend I wouldn’t have to create another account when I hit 2.8 GB.
All you files sucked in to an infinite inbox from where they will never return. The general public are retards but surely they aren’t stupid enough to believe it’s an infinite mailbox. Maybe Yahoo have discovered a quantum mailbox system where they use infinite parallel universes to store all the files. Then again I think they’re just using marketing bollox.
And just why should anybody want an infinite mail box !?.Maybe if i had an six dimensional software product!.
“People should think about e-mail as something where they are archiving their lives”
… and we all want to use yahoo services to access our lives, don’t we.
well . i already filled up once my 2,8GB from gmail, i deleted 2GB of older messages and now it’s 81% again… and this amount only with regular mail from my work as freelancer that has lots of attachments to and from clients…
so there are people who need this amount of storage…
ps. please excuse my poor english as english is not my native language.
“you have something called Gmail drive, so you can use your account as a virtual drive in ‘My Computer’. Works awesome. It’s time someone makes a yahoo-version then!” -Scit
That’s about the only thing it would be useful for. I can’t understand why anyone would want to save e-mail anyway. You read the e-mail, then you delete it. I have a Gmail drive myself but never once used it. It is a good place for backing up some important files however.
Of course what we should be talking about is why do these companies do this (increasing e-mail storage). The reason that they do it is to encourage users to store all their e-mail throughout their lives and never delete it. This in turn, gives these assholes access to a lot of information about people which they can then use or sell for marketing purposes, help convict people of crimes, etc., etc. It’s basically like me renting out my hard drive to someone. “Hey, free storage!” right? But then of course I would have access to everything that you put there.
I’m not saying that these companies will do anything illegal or unorthodox with your data. But, don’t rely on some privacy policy to protect you. They can change their service terms anytime they want and the way they wrote the terms will always favor them in case of a legal proceeding.
Be smart – delete your e-mail people. Don’t give these assholes access to your personal lives. They want your data…that’s why they’re offering more and more storage…just think about it. What else would be the motivation for these companies outdoing each other on e-mail storage? It’s free; they won’t make any money from it (at least directly). They do make money from ads and marketing. Yahoo wants to beat Google to get as much personal data from you as possible, it’s really that simple. Once they have your data, they can do anything they want with it. They can sell your data to marketing companies, or use it against you in a court of law.
The choice is yours, children. You can either give in to these companies’ marketing ploys or you can be smart and pass on their “offers”.
i love your mom
I used to use a linux script which mounted my gmail
account as a virtual drive. It used python to convert
the data into encoded emails which it sent from me to
myself. It actually worked quite well when gmail wasn’t
acting like a crack addict. I never got around to testing
the true limit due to the slow write time. One day I’ll
try it out.
“And just why should anybody want an infinite mail box !?.”
actually no one. Yahoo knows this, they’re just using the ‘contrast principle’ as their marketing ploy. and from my own personally experience with a startup company from the Dotcom days, i can assure you it works beyond your wildest imagination. People are sheeps, they’ll now correlate the ‘Yahoo’ brand with features like ‘infinite’, ‘unlimited’, not just Yahoo Email. Hence Yahoo is the best compared to everyone else..
They can have as many memory as the want, yahoo mail ist still teh sheisse!
but arent you limited in gmail to like 10mb per file.. and like who da fuk wants to fill up a thing thats 2 or 3 gb in size with 10mb files… BaaaaaaH
“People should think about e-mail as something where they are archiving their lives,”
The Man would love that, just a subpoena away from joe average revealing more than he expected!
Google put up a fight not to reveal search info, i bet yahoo and the like are just a little bit more co-operative.
Well as long as the attachment size is not 10MB limit then I say it’s a good idea.
cool, i dont even use this much storage, but its cool tough. (I guess im one of those “average” users you guys were talking about)
Useless, this isn’t even worth making a post. Maybe it’d have been worth it if the poster mentioned it was Yahoo! Mail’s 10th birthday.
Anyways, I find this so called infinite space totally worthless, nothing but a cheap marketing gimmick.
What we really want from yahoo are better spam prevention, more filters, POP3/IMAP access, and a good interface that works in Opera.
the big picture here is y! is pulling the caps off of all storage limits over time. Filo has a hard on for the “social disk” concept. Flickr brought the koolaid by showing how charging for bandwidth not disk space can work. and yeah, its about keeping y! in the center of the web users universe. not so nefarious as snooping your files, simply justification for charging ten times as much for banner ads.
and once you’ve got all your stash in their boxes, they can charge extra to help you find and manage all that crap. “premium services”.
@Dexter
you know Opera never makes it onto their official A-grade browser list, don’t you? that means no love what so ever. don’t think they even q/a against it.
I’d agree with Mr.X 10mb attachments are fucking annoying, and there is no use to the infinite storage unless they raise the barrier
Now mail mailbox homepage reads
“The storage meter is now history.
Revel in unlimited space for more of what you love.”
effective today. high-five!