March 27, 2007
Yahoo to offer unlimited e-mail storage
By Eric Auchard
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc. plans to offer unlimited e-mail
storage to its roughly quarter of a billion users, starting in May, it
said on Tuesday.
The world's biggest e-mail service is scrapping its free e-mail
storage limit of 1 gigabyte, or about a billion bytes of data,
responding to explosive growth in attachment sizes as people share
ever more photos, music and videos via e-mail.
Microsoft has a 2 gigabyte free e-mail storage limit, while Google
caps its Gmail service at 2.8 gigabytes.
"We are giving them no reason to ever have to delete old e-mails,"
Yahoo co-founder David Filo said in a phone interview. "You can keep
stuff forever."
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.
By contrast, when Yahoo first introduced its e-mail service a little
under a decade ago, it capped individual storage at 4 megabytes per
user. At that time, an "ultra high-density" floppy disk for personal
computers then held 144 megabytes.
"People should think about e-mail as something where they are
archiving their lives," said Filo, who remains active in managing
technical operations at the Sunnyvale, California, company and carries
the honorific title of Chief Yahoo.
Starting in May, the changeover to unlimited storage should take a
month, said John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail.
"We have been closely monitoring average usage. We are comfortable
that our users are far under 1 gig(abyte), on average," Kremer said by
phone. "What we see are an increasing number of rich media files as
consumers send more photos."
One caveat Yahoo makes is that the offer is for personal use and
subject to guidelines against abuse that apply to Yahoo Mail. No one
can build a business giving away unlimited storage to other consumers
using Yahoo Mail, executives said.
Two countries -- China and Japan -- are excluded. "We will continue
working with these markets on their storage plans," Kremer said in a
statement. Yahoo is a minority owner with partner Softbank in Yahoo
Japan Corp. and a part owner with Alibaba of the Yahoo business in
China.
Filo said Yahoo is looking at lifting caps on storage for other
services such as its Flickr photo-sharing service. "We are looking at
those on a case-by-case basis," he said.
It's a far cry from when giving away 2 megabytes of data was
considered a big deal, said David Nakayama, Yahoo's group vice
president of engineering and developer of RocketMail, which Yahoo
acquired and relaunched as Yahoo Mail in 1997.
In a posting to Yahoo's corporate blog, he said capacity when Yahoo
Mail started was 200 gigabytes for all customers.
"I remember getting in a room to plan our RocketMail launch over a
decade ago and worrying that our original plan of a 2 megabyte quota
wasn't enough, and that we needed to be radical and DOUBLE the storage
to 4 megabyte per account!" he wrote.