Yahoo! offers unlimited storage


28 Mar 2007

Yahoo! will offer unlimited amount of storage with its free webmail service beginning in May, it was announced today.

Currently Yahoo! Mail offers 1GB of storage with its free mail service and 2GB with its paid account. This compares currently with Microsoft’s Hotmail offering of 2GB and Google’s offering of 2.8GB, both free.

When Yahoo! Mail was first launched 10 years ago it offered a mere 4MB of storage. Nowadays the average media attachment to an email is larger than this.

“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,” said David Kremer, vice-president of Yahoo! Mail on its official blog.

This service will be phased in gradually due to its large undertaking. Kremer added: “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.”

While users are promised unlimited storage, Yahoo! has been monitoring the habits of its webmail users, according to Kremer, and have found that on average the individual email account is holding well under 1GB.

Co-founder of Yahoo! David Filo reportedly said the new service offered in May will mean that nothing will ever have to be deleted again, that Yahoo! Mail users can keep it forever.

Email archiving will be a billion dollar software and services market by 2010, up from US$471m in 2006, according to a recent study by the IDC, a global marketing firm.

The study also stated that in 2007, “the amount of information created will surpass, for the first time, the storage capacity available”.

By Marie Boran