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Yahoo Ups Mail to Match Google's Gig
Bruce Young writes "Yahoo said late Tuesday that it will provide 1 gigabyte of storage for each free e-mail account. The current limit is 250 megabytes. The expanded storage which will be available in mid-April will enable Yahoo to catch up with online search engine leader Google. "
So Yahoo, you want me as a customer? Here's what you have to do:
* remove those nasty ads
* filter spam better
* add POP3 access back (you were one of the first free online mailers with POP3, then you removed it so that people would use your crappy ad-full interface)
* (and speaking of which) improve your web interface to (at least) Google standards
When you're done, let me know and I just might give up my nice gmail account.
Just
Well that seems to be a big middle finger to Yahoo!'s paying Mail Plus users. I wonder if they're not going to try to offer something extra to them as well. Right now is sounds like the only difference would be POP access and extra filters.
There is still room for Google to get worse and yahoo to get better. Yahoo used to be in Google's shoes, and there is nothing to say that Google won't go the same way.
Before you guys get in a huff about Yahoo! vs. Google mail services, it stands to reason that many of us have both, plus a hotmail account.
Yahoo upping online storage is a good thing for all of us.
This is great. Hopefully google/yahoo/hotmail will all add more inovative features and the same low low price (feeding you ads is the price you pay).
Computer companies do amazing things when there is competetion..
Other than for marketing of course.
I personally will probably never fill 250mb, let alone a gig.
I love gmail for all its features that Yahoo just doesnt have. I love the searching through archived mail. I love the labels instead of folders. And I -love- the threaded conversation view.
Yahoo would have to come up with some pretty killer feature at this point for me to even look at it. Even if it matched the featureset, it's still slow and cluttered compared to Gmail. And even then, I trust google more with all my mail than I do Yahoo.
Basically, just upping to a gig from 250mb...I could see this maybe stopping some Joe Sixpacks who use Yahoo now from switching to Gmail, but anyone who has actually used Gmail will probably never switch to Yahoo. The goodness just isnt there.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
Did anybody move to GMail just because of the 1GB limit? I was a YahooMail user and was waaaayyyy off the 250Mb limit. The attractiveness of GMail for me was the snappiness of the responses, the threaded email conversations and general clean UI. Cranking YahooMail up to a GB will not change any of this.
In that sense you're right, but overall when comparing the two in terms of features and user-friendliness (from a new customer's perspective) I think Google wins out, I don't think Yahoo could really catch up now. But competetion is good, for sure.
There are 2 types of people in the world, those who find that stupid binary joke funny, and those who don't.
Why not believe them. The way people use web mail, certainly my usage has changed over the years. Do you seriously expect Yahoo to stick with what worked for most people in 1997?
And FYI Yahoo had email before Google was even a blip on the horizon for Altavista so it more like Google are trying to beat yahoo ay their own game. Either way I dont care, I win.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
So you want an address book, a calendar, file storage, personalized news, an IM client, message boards, and web server?
Hmm, I kinda just wanted to get my email.
And, by the way, what we want to acces 1GB of mail is IMAP acces, not POP3!
Yahoo has graphic ads.
Graphic ads SUCK.
What competition did Microsoft "shut down"? OS/2? BeOS?
I'm afraid those operating systems were halted by their own inadequacy. Microsoft won out simply because there was nothing better available. Now we have Linux, but Microsoft already had dominated teh market by the time Linux became a viable desktop OS.
Socialism: A feeling of discontent and resentment caused by a desire for the possessions or qualities of another.
Well, it's funny that they had that same quota from 1997 from then until last year when gmail's beta started growing, at which point they made it 250MB. Then they upped it to a gig - exactly what google offers - within a week of gmail's expansion to the general populace.
If you believe in that many coincidences, you must have been on the OJ jury, would explain a lot.
I agree that this may signal that Yahoo is losing its competitive edge. However, in fairness Google started its 1gig service when it had zero customers. Yahoo is switching now with a gazillion.
0 x 1gig = 0gigs
gazillion x 250mb = a quarter gazillion gigs.
So, maybe now that Gmail is out of beta and has a quarter gazillion customers, they have a quarter gazillion gigs too, but they definitely didn't start out using up as much storage capacity as Yahoo already was using. Google just looks faster in this case because it was able to scale, whereas Yahoo had to quantum leap.
(Note to math purists: I'm using the word gazillion-- I'm aware that I'm making hugely flawed assumptions in my math, such as not everyone using the full amount of space. I don't care.)
Yahoo has graphic ads.
Graphic ads SUCK.
Automatically reading all of your email so that Google can target text ads at you sucks even more. I'll take Yahoo's randomly-targeted graphic ads any day.
"Reading" isn't exactly correct, "scanning for keywords" is more like it. I imagine it's very similar to grepping for a list of keywords in your mbox file.
If you don't trust anyone to not read your email, run your own mail server.
You can't really compare them yet, because Yahoo are already ahead. Yahoo is an actual running service, Google is just a beta. When Google finally opens their service then we can make a comparison.
Email storage is quickly headed the way of online service hours and cell phone plan minutes.
Once the company offers a quota larger than 99% of its users will use, then it can increase the quota arbitrarily without needing any additional resources to supply the (unused) storage space. After that, it's just a marketing exercise in using (pointlessly) inflated numbers to sell to new subscribers.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)