The company said it would start a phased roll-out of unlimited storage from May, lifting the current 1GB limit of users of Yahoo Mail’s free service, and the 2GB cap currently imposed on its premium service customers.
The transition to unlimited storage could take several months, according to Yahoo Mail vice-president John Kremer.
“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,” Mr Kremer said.
The Yahoo move seems to confirm what many have suspected for a long time – that storage prices have fallen so dramatically it is now possible for service providers to sell it for free.
Certainly it is a long way from where Yahoo Mail started ten years ago where users were offered maximum total storage of 4MB for their email accounts.
And David Nakayama, who founded the RocketMail web-based email that was acquired by Yahoo to become Yahoo Mail, said the original quota for the service was 2MB per user – and that the maximum total storage capacity for all RocketMail users was 200GB,
“At Yahoo, we’re now receiving more inbound mail than that (200Gb) every 10 minutes,” Mr Nakayama said.
It is not clear whether the other free email providers will follow the Yahoo leada. Microsoft’s Hotmail service currently has a storage cap of 2GB, while Google’s Gmail is capped at 2.8GB.
Mr Kremer said the company would put anti-abuse limits in place to protect users, primarily outlawing things like using the service to resell storage capacity.
“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,” Mr Kremer said.
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