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Yahoo Boosts Email Space in response to Gmail
coleslawjoe writes "This article at New York Times explains that Yahoo has decided to boost their E-mail space (Soul sucking registration required) from their current 4 megabytes to 100 in response to Gmail. They are also planning to offer 2 gig mailboxes for $19.99(USD)."
Looks like only 2 of my 3 Yahoo! accounts got the boost overnight? Anyone know more details about the rollout? polymorpheus
Why ever would I want a whole gigabyte? I'll just go to yahoo and get one-hundred entire megabytes of wonderful inbox space, on a page riddled with graphical advertisements. This is so much better than a gigabyte of inbox space, on a page with text ads. I'll tell all my friends about Yahoo!'s new, awesome offer.
Hrm...tough choice, i'd say. Heh, they are all going to be playing catch-up to Google for a bit anyway; hopefully we can see more (and better) deals in light of google bringing us such great things (like so many other company's have decided not to do, instead money-grubbing and pulling and biting and lying to get another dollar from you.
no registration required
What makes Gmail incredible and revolutionary is the search features, the amazing interface, the threading, the labeling, and the tried and true "google minimalism."
Getting 1000mB's of space is just a side effect, that's there because gmail makes it desirable to archive multiple entire mailing lists.
Yahoo! is missing the point.
Big surprise there. Yahoo need to do something to remain competitive.
I'm personally waiting for gmail to come out of beta and then I'll probably move from yahoo to google locak, stock and two smoking spam filters!
Offtopic, but why does google engender a warm fuzzy feeling of trust whereas yahoo, hotmail and the rest "feel" like corporates out to make a quick buck? It's a totally false feeling, but it's happens...
Yahoo gives a warning when your mailbox reaches a certain size anyway, so it's easy to do some quick maintenance like delete that email with the absurdly large attachment to get the space back. But 100megs will certainly help.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Not just a plan. My wife has a paid plan with Yahoo and she had 2GB this morning.
I've gotta say, I think it's going to be hard for Gmail to compete. The Gmail Web interface isn't all that impressive and presuming that Yahoo and MSN can get their spam filtering and storage space up to snuff (Yahoo's got the space and the hotmail spam filtering is actually really good now), Google doesn't really have the breadth of services that the other guys do.
That said, they're smart guys, so hopefully they're working on something better than what they're beta testing.
I logged in this morning and saw the new user interface and the 2G limit. I've never had my yahoo mail down to 1% before. :)
And another bonus is that yahoo does not count items in their bulk mail (spam) folder towards your quota.
Now to fill up my 2G limit. I think I'll mail myself some CDs.
Nope, it seems that all sites powered by Akamai are unreachable right now...
...throwing down the gauntlet. I have had a Yahoo Plus account for a little over a year now, so I got my 2Gb space when I logged in this morning. At this point, Yahoo has the advantage of an online calendar (a great tool if you are a traveler)and the ability to sort your mail into folders. I also have a GMail account, mainly because it was offered to me. While the idea of that much space is appealing, I don't like not being able to sort my mail. Furthermore, I believe this encourages people to store documents online, a practice that is, IMHO, dangerous given the problems that Hotmail has had recently.
Don't be a looter...and yes, I know that it's spelled with an "A" instead of an "E".
No one is happier than I that Yahoo is increasing my quota. I'm just about out of space, and don't want to irritate my friends by bouncing back their messages. My mom can get pretty pissed too.
How long before spam starts including multimedia files that eat up the extra allocation? Now that so many people have broadband, there's no reason to stick to smaller messages. Emails may start to include much more advanced/annoying graphics, sounds and maybe interactive ad-games.
Check out my blog: My Galaxy is Milky Way Adjacent
Thats not totally true. Sometimes I keep old e-mails for reference (i.e. any online purchases), contacts, etc. Yes I could transcribe them, but I would prefer, at times to keep the e-mail and should have the right. I do not think it is a solution to just delete emails that are old.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
The change seems to be quite inconsistent throughout their servers. I have several Yahoo accounts for different purposes, and when logging onto them today, sometimes it would show 100MB and upon going back to the Inbox page, it would show 4MB, sometimes the new stylesheet would load and other times only partially. Seems to be broken all over the place.
I am really excited about their new DHTML-enabled interface. I just can't read mail without links that change colors when you hover over them!!!
That's cool. It'll be nice not to have to clear out my Yahoo! inbox every week. This will probably stop me migrating. After all everyone already knows my @yahoo.com email address.
However, at some point my 100Mb box will be full, and I'll want to get it down to, say 50Mb. At which point I very much hope there'll be some decent new tools for bulk deletion. The idea of trying to free up 50Mb by clicking through page after page of email going "select... delete..." does not appeal.
....right here.
The Army reading list
Actually, I think that's more a result of Yahoo migrating to the new system. I've seen the new interface from my friend's account like 6 hours ago and it looks pretty slick. He had thought Yahoo! was bugged but we kept refreshing and we were able to watch them migrate to the new interface in real time.
... they are still probably porting over some of the accounts ... I wonder why they couldn't make "global" changes that would affect all users at once, as it probably should be?
I logged into my account and it was still using the old interface and had the old 4-megabyte limit. It wasn't until I logged in like 10 minutes ago that I logged in to see the new interface, although a bit broken
Take off every 'sig'!
All your 'sig' are belong to us!
Gmail: 1,024 megabytes
Yahoo: 100 megabytes
I think it's pretty clear that Yahoo is getting desperate and stupid; they most lileky don't have the infrastructure in place to offer 1GB email accounts or they already would have. 100MB is just a temporary kludge to keep existing users from flocking to GMail as long as possible (p.s: it won't work!)
we could all get so gooey over webmail again? or is it just me... ? ;-)
No one is happier than I that Yahoo is increasing my quota. I'm just about out of space, and don't want to irritate my friends by bouncing back their messages. My mom can get pretty pissed too.
How long before spam starts including multimedia files that eat up the extra allocation? Now that so many people have broadband, there's no reason to stick to smaller messages. Emails may start to include much more advanced/annoying graphics, sounds and maybe interactive ad-games.
Check out my blog: My Galaxy is Milky Way Adjacent
100 megs to 1 gig
Let me ponder on that thought while I delete my 200 + spam mails a day, that I need to sort through manually to inspect that it does not contain any of my friends.
The 200 + spam mails a day is a recent event. About two-three months ago I used to average about 20-40 a day - all of a sudden there was a huge surge.
I won't mind giving Gmail a try and hope their spam filters are better. While I do not mind a skyscraper ad, on the side of my email, I do mind pop-ups/under. I hope that the ads they propose won't contain porn/hate websites....it would be annoying if I am at work trying to read my email but cannot due to the half naked woman to the right of my e-mail.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Mail Options->General Preferences->Messages per page
until you forget the key?
It was an electronic key that was stored in his e-mail box. Unfortunately due to the expiration of his e-mail, the key was deleted and now he can't access any of his e-mails.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
This article at New York Times explains that Yahoo has decided to boost their E-mail space (Soul sucking registration required) from their current 4 megabytes to 100 in response to Gmail. They are also planning to offer 2 gig mailboxes for $19.99(USD)
Hmm. Now, let's figure out which business deal is better, shall we?
Do I either,
A) Pay $20 for a 2 gig Yahoo box, or
B) Open up 2 GMail accounts for free and still have 2 gigs of storage.
Now, the true genius will suddenly realize that if you open 3 accounts, that means you have 3 gigs of space, and that's more than 2 gigs that Yahoo offers. How many of you figured that one out?
I was graced today when, still almost asleep, I signed in in my Yahoo-mail, and was greeted by the upgrade message.
:), I thought I had clicked in a wrong link, so I clicked the back button and re-did the sign in, and to my surprise, there it was again!
:-)
Funnily (is that a word?
Still trying to like the new interface, though.
Competition is good, isn't it?
If only there were two blondes trying to please me...
Here's a snippet from my e-mail:
You are currently exceeding your Yahoo! Mail storage quota by a very large amount. You are only allowed -2048.0MB of storage but you are currently using 0.0MB of storage. Your account has been temporarily disabled from receiving new messages.
The easiest way to continue receiving your important email is to expand your mailbox. Yahoo! Mail offers 10, 25, 50 and 100MB of storage space starting at just $9.99/year.
Nice to know that I can only have negative storage. Looks like they want me to give them storage. Not exactly sure how I'm supposed to do that... At least it's just an account that comes with my DSL that I don't use.
My .co.uk address is still stuck on 6Mb - although I have been getting free POP access ever since they started charging .com accounts for it, so it's not all bad news.
I began using Yahoo! Mail years ago and I've had 6MB per email address (I've got two) ever since. When I signed my mother and father up to have Yahoo! Mail accounts two years later they were given 4M accounts.
The first thought I had though since being notified of the increase was, "How the heck am I going to keep track of all the junk I'll eventually have to delete?" My answer was, "To never allow it to clog in the first place by removing immediately any e-mails that I may want to save." The obvious answer.
IIRC, Yahoo only allows you to set up 10 rules for handling the email you receive. This is troublesome because now that we've been given so much free space, I know people will want to seperate their space by using folders - ideally, automatically - for just about everything and everyone they know. But, if 10 rules are the limit, I see in the future that limitations on space won't be the driving factor in attracting customers. Once again, it will all boil down to service and services available (options, rules, etc.) to the end user.
Except for the fact that when I email myself it puts my messages into the spam folder. I guess Yahoo believes that any mail coming from a Yahoo account IS spam. :)
Because installing sendmail and some spam filter is non-trivial, and often a pain in the ass, and you have to worry about system security, patching, maintenance...
I'm seriously considering shutting down my own mail host because I've moved it three times in the last year, and every time I set it up again, I wonder why I'm putting all this effort into it.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
>> Particularly nice or significant email messages
> Never got one I wanted to keep yet.
i think this says it all, really.
I'm sorry to hear that; I really am.
Akamai's DNS servers appear to be MIA. Did someone find the Akamai Achilles heel?
This means Microsoft.com, Applce.com, Google.com and many other sites don't resolve right now. Oops.
"The truth shall make ye fret" -- The Truth, Terry Pratchett
ISP's come and go
The majority of people I know already dislike Yahoo and LOVE Google (don't we all?), so upgrading their service (and still not meeting Google's offering) isn't really going to help anything at all.
I know nothing
Yeah - microsoft.com resolves, but not www.microsoft.com. Same with gmail.google.com, and www.google.com. :)
I imagine some people at Akamai are sweating a bit right now
Get your own free personal location tracker
get the 2GB / no adv version @ no additional cost. /happy DSL customer @ $29/ mo for 256/1.5
Um, Yahoo clearly states that mail in the "Bulk" (SPAM) folder does not couny against your upper limit.
I actually think that Yahoo's spam filtering is very good. I only get a few false positives a month. And there is also a mailbox-specific domain blocker that you have control over.
Pretty good service for free, methinks.
P.S. Thanks for Slahdotting mail.yahoo.com guys! Now I can't check my mail!
"You cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense." - C.S. Lewis on Intelligent Design
I do deliberately keep my email, and it pisses me off no end when I get some sort of hard disk crash that causes me to lose old archived email.
Hey! someone found a problem to your solution just recently. Its called "Backup". A revolutionary new technology that allows you to make a copy of your data to a non-volotile memory "device", such as a tape or compact disk. The technology even supports you bringing the "device" offsite so it survives fires/burglaries etc
Amazing, huh ?
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
It's the other features such as Search, Labels, Conversations, Keyboard Shortcuts, and a lightning-fast interface that leverage the larger storage space. Anyone can offer tons of space, but unless you provide tools to effectivly utilize it, it's just space.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
and unbridled competition are once again evident as Yahoo has used its monopoly power to force an additional 96MB of space on us all!
You call not being able to send HTML mail a problem?
;-)
It's a new feature!
In God We Trust, Others We Monitor
Great idea!!
Being forced to have IE, mozilla and opera open at the same time with your 3 logins when you want to search for some thing would be ultra cool
Damn!! I am not a genius
For those who might be curious, I found an easy way to get rid of ads when reading your gmail (if for some reason, ads really bother you).
Just ask everyone to put the word "died" at the end of their messages. Gmail has this filter that tries not to be too insensitive by plastering your browser with ads for caskets next to news that Uncle Bob just died, so I guess it searches for words like that.
I tried with the words "disaster", "died", etc. and they all caused ads to disappear.
It might be creepy though after a while if every email had the word "died" at the bottom.... )
...and pop access
I don't understand the need for these gargantuan email boxes. My personal (non-work) IMAP mailbox has mail dating back to July 2002 (all of my email before that is archived and I never look at it), and it's just under 60 megabytes. At that rate, I would reach Yahoo!'s limit by the end of 2008, at which point I would probably just archive my email again. My work email is an entirely separate, company-provided account, but I still only have 186 megabytes of email going back to May 2000. 46.5 megabytes per year.
I think if you're using 1-2 GB for your email, then you should consider some non-email ways of managing your data. There are already many sites on the internet that archive mailing lists, so there's no need to keep around a personal copy of list mail. Purging the Trash and deleting spam messages helps to save space. Instead of emailing large files, consider serving them up on the web, ftp, etc. Even if you do email large files, there's no need to keep them in your mailbox after they are downloaded. Save them to your computer, burn them to a CD if needed, and delete them.
Then again, maybe everyone else on the internet is just way more popular than I am.
RTFM. From the article:
Yahoo's increased storage calls into question its longstanding business of selling larger mailboxes to its users. Its prices have ranged from $9.99 a year for a 10-megabyte mailbox, to $49.99 a year for 100 megabytes, the size it now offers free. Customers of the services will be converted to Yahoo's new two-gigabyte Plus service. Customers who are content with the 100-megabyte free account will be able to request refunds.
It would be interesting to see what Microsoft would be doing with hotmail to be in competition with yahoo and gmail.
The only changes that I had seen in hotmail in the past 3-4 years are a decrease in the inbox space to a mere 2 megs, some zazzy icons and some improvements in the spam filtering.
People say Microsoft doesn't go innovative with their browser, OSes and the office suites because of almost zero competition (ie after ensuring that competition is almost zero). But what in the free-email wars??
Or is it that hotmail is doomed to be lost in history like the dot-com boom of which it had been one of the catalysts
"One thing neither company has caught onto yet is a need / desire for throw-away addresses."
Ask and you shall receive.
"AddressGuard is a feature of your Yahoo! Mail Plus subscription. It lets you create disposable email addresses to use whenever you do not want to give out your real Yahoo! Mail Address.
Messages sent to any of your disposable email addresses will be automatically forwarded to your Yahoo! Mail account, and you can decide to direct these messages to a specific folder.
If any of your disposable email addresses start getting spam, you can simply delete it and messages sent to this address will start bouncing instead of filling up your account."
Yahoo's mail site appears to be slashdotted. Kind of hard to take advantage of all that storage space if you can't log in. Nice planning, Yahoo.
Yahoo
Yahoo is hoping that increasing the storage space to 100MB will keep a lot of people from switching to Gmail.
Gmail
They've also removed all ads, etc. But access seems REALLY slow. Probably everyone logging in at once to check it out...
Ok, everyone, quit with this binary mode of thinking For whatever impact this has on Google, this is *good* news. How many of you will have one google account or yahoo account only?
Just as Google is a lot more than the search engine, having a Yahoo identity is useful for more than just email.
In fact, I probably spend more time on Yahoo than on any other site these days
- Customized news,
- Finances,
- Movies,
- Maps,
- Groups...
- some shopping (though I use other services more often.)
- I'm constantly logged in to Yahoo's IM,
- sometimes use the Video Conferencing feature.
- I'll also play Yahoo Games,
- use calendar features at times.
- Yahoo's has the best solution for maintaining several identities
- I use at least one for Work, (As a consultant, I use one identity for each client)
- one for long term personal,
- one for short term personal.
Hell, on a daily basis, I probably use more resources from Yahoo than I do from any other media source including Google and TV.
100 MB will do it for me. It means that people can send me larger attachments, and I can keep some of them online. I also use YahooPOPs to pull my email onto my personal HD, so I don't anticipate having storage problems. Further, I'll still register for Gmail when it becomes available.
I've been using Yahoo! since the 6MB days. When I got my gmail invite, I approached it with an open mind. It reeled me in hook, line and sinker.
1) It's a clean interface. For the last 2 years I've been using Opera with Yahoo Mail just to apply a custom style sheet so I didn't have to see the horrid ads they put everywhere. Some were nearing seizure inducing. Oh? Yahoo mail cleaned their interface up you tell me? Yes... in response to gmail. That doesn't excuse the fact that without gmail, they thought it was OK to plaster my mail with ads.
2) Yahoo still has a tagline at the end of every mail. Will gmail? I don't know. But this is about how i still hate yahoo.
3) It's slow. It's always been slow. you have to reload the whole page to check for new mail. (no, I'm not going to run their messanger to check my mail, thanks). gmail has a nice 2-minute pooling feature.
4) Why is it so slow? They got rid of the graphical ads. I really thought that was most of the slow.
5) Slow. Will gmail be slow after beta? I don't know. But this is about how i still hate yahoo.
I never had space problems but now I can't even get my email on yahoo. Guess their servers are being overwhelmed with people checking it out.
Thanks yahoo.
It wouldn't be a problem normally, but I had an email about an interview in it I needed to check. Had to call the contact without knowing his name. Never quite heard it when I talked to him before, and naturally it was not a simply name like Bob, Jim, Jack, or Phil.
The 2GB option for paying users features search.
Quit modding it. :P
http://yahoopops.sourceforge.net/
Screw a company that provides you with world-class service for free. Now that would be fair, right?
irrelevant. No one really needs more than 100M of email space. Now they will have to compete on convenience, features, etc. They (they being Google) are still in a strong position, but not as strong as before. If I were to choose between email providers I'd use the one that has POP3 (or IMAP) available and better spam filtering.
I actually thing Google screwed themselves by announcing this service too early in the game. If they announced a full blown, stable version they'd have a GIANT market lead.
But the other thing to not forget is that Yahoo is ONLY doing this in response to Gmail. Prior to that Yahoo was actually taking away features and making more things only available to paying customers. I've been a Yahoo user almost since the beginning and have been constantly disappointed with any service that I paid them for. They have a tendency to bait and switch, or simply discontinue a service when it doesn't perform as they expected. I used their text paging service (for the year it was available) their local dial-up service (ditto) and am currently using Yahoo domains (which have been lowering their price in an effort to prevent erosion, rather than adding features).
I don't give a company credit for innovation when all they are doing is responding to REAL innovation. Gmail, from what I've seen so far is better, faster, has an interesting alternative to folders which may prove to be more effective, and has a commitment to continue adding features to their free service. Google has no add on services that you can pay for and I think they intend to keep it that way. They have Yahoo and MSN quaking in their boots and I think thats a good thing.
I'll stick with Gmail until something BETTER, not just AS GOOD comes along.
Check out Nexic's Personal Publisher. It doesn't give you a PST file, but it does archive your email.
Or if you really want a PST, open your GW mailbox with outlook as a front-end(assuming you are on a live system, and not just POP3).
I agree with you. And here's some relevant ramblings.
/. front page. Either way, once those issues are cleared up, I'll have an email account that I wouldn't trade for a free gMail account. Yahoo has been in this game much longer and they know what they're doing. I've never lost data with them. My understanding of Google's idea of "redundancy" is to throw 100 cheap PCs at the problem and hope nothing gets lost. I love their search engine, but that's not exactly an awe inspiring model for retaining personal data.
I don't know if you've actually tried Yahoo's Plus service, but I have it and it rocks. Besides the 2GB storage space, I *DO* have POP access to my Yahoo mail account. Couple that with Yahoo's near perfect spam filtering (I see maybe 2 or 3 spam a day out of about 500 I receive every day), and it's really a helluva service.
Besides email Yahoo also gives me a personal home page that is VERY configurable, a nice address book with import/export capabilities, a personal calendar, a personal file area (briefcase), etc. Does Google provide all that? I doubt it. On top of that, they would have to provide a better version of all that in order for people like me to care.
There currently ARE some response time issues with Yahoo mail, but those may be related to the Akamai issues noted on today's
We'll see how it all pans out. But for now, Yahoo gets actual money from me and Google does not.
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
That Anonymous Coward guy posts a lot of stuff!
Figures... Last night i had to clean out 2 of my 4 yahoo emails because they were both over 90% full. And if I would of waited till today I could of left them all there. Damned my luck to hell!
I haven't used yahoo's mail in a few years, but as I remember the interface was clunky, slow, and painful, and there were adds above and/or below.
.js file that is cached locally and after that everything is very very quick.
Regardless of the space they give you, that's probel number one. GMail has a very slick interface. It's as responsive as a web based user interface as any of the standalone mail programs I have used, which is very impressive. From what I hear, there is an 80kb
There isn't any difference between one gigabyte and one hundred megabytes to 99.9% of the people out there who could fit their mail in a few megs easily. It's really only power-users/mailing list subscribers who'll even approach one hundred. Heck, at my school I'm capped at $150 and after a year of deleting nothing I'm only at 30%. I'm a member of python-dev and wxpython-users which are both moderately trafficked groups and used to belong to python-users which is a very high traffic group. All these messages (thousands) are still around. It would take me a lot of time to fill that 150M, much less a gigabyte.
In any case, Yahoo should follow google's lead in the ad policies/user interface, rather than raw space. You could offer a terabyte and no one would even approach it, *it doesn't matter* If you're using a gig on gmail right now, chances are you are either being gratuitously inefficient or somehow abusing the system (using it for backup or something). There's just no way.
Brian
It's been awhile since I had a Yahoo! account, but what I remember of it was pretty much like every other Web-based email system -- every other, except Gmail. Sure, sure, the storage space is nice, but that's just a component of what really makes Gmail useful: Full-featured search capability.
Here's an example, from which you can extrapolate your own interests (coding, or recipes, or political commentary, etc., instead of models). As a photographer, I like to be kept informed about new models in my area who have signed up with OneModelPlace.com. So, I have signed up with that site to get automated notifications, which now go to my Gmail account. When I get a notification, I decide -- by looking at the model's portfolio -- whether it's a "keeper" or not. If not, I delete it, because I don't want it coming up in my searches later. If it's a keeper, I tack on a "Interesting Models" label and archive the message. That's where the big storage helps.
Then, when I want to find a model that meets certain criteria, I can do a search in my Gmail account. For example, I could do a search for "nude AND edmonds" if I wanted to find a model in Edmonds, WA who is available for nude work. This is better than doing a search on OMP directly, because I know the model's portfolio isn't "stale" (since some "models" on OMP are no longer modeling), and I've already culled out those models I probably wouldn't be interested in working with (for whatever reason -- cost, looks, etc.), so my results in my Gmail search are prequalified.
Other features of Gmail are nice, but not necessarily unique. For example, Opera's email client allows the use of labels (although I haven't used that client enough to know if they work as well as Gmail's label feature). Other features are underpowered or missing -- if you're looking for a Web-based email address that has lots of integration gimmicks, then Gmail doesn't cut it, at least not yet. But for raw power for the core purpose of handling email, I'm liking Gmail more and more.
Obviously, as with any Web-based email, or really any non-encrypted email, there are privacy concerns, but those can be managed. While I probably won't use Gmail for personal mail very often (if ever), I certainly will use it for newsletters and other content that I might want to be able to search in the future.
No Laughing Allowed!
For those that are overrun with spam, virii and anything else that can be embedded in an html this actually IS a feature.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
Kids today.