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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. "
will we soon surf to yahoogle.com?
Exercise caution when modding this message up: the author acts like a jerk when his karma is excellent.
Yahoo have apparently denied that it is trying to beat Google at it's own game but said that it reflected the way subscribers are using email...umm, sure...we believe you..
Yahoo got that yet? Last i checked they didn't, which means you got to go through all of Yahoo's webmail interface.
"I may be full of crap about this game, and I may be wrong, and that's fine." -Jack Thompson
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.
GMAIL and Yahoo! mail have so much storage, I hear people are giving up on carrying around USB sticks and just using HTTP mail. I haven't heard of any security breaches where someone has had access to any appreciable number of files stored on their sites, but I suppose it's just a matter of time.
"Well..here I am..." - Jubal Early
Wonder if the fellow who wrote the Gmail File System will do an adaptation...
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
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..
The fact that is has taken Yahoo this long to play catch-up says a lot more than we may initially think. Many argue that the secret to Google's success is its highly adaptable and powerfull hardware architecture. They can increase their storage capacity very quickly just by adding more machines to its cluster. Yahoo has nowhere near the same adaptability as Google.
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.
They still won't be as good as Google.. stop trying!
I disagree from a business perspective.
Lots of people will stay with yahoo mail because it is difficult to switch. If there is no benefit, then there is little reason to make the switch in the first place.
Competition is good. Now, they will start competing on other features and the consumer wins in the end.
More
And that's just a start.
I don't respond to AC's.
There's more to Gmail than the 1GB account limit. The sooner that Microsoft, Yahoo and everyone else realise this the better.
I've had a Hotmail account for almost 10 years now (way before Microsoft got it hands on it) and a Gmail account for just under a year too. In the last three years Hotmail has been going backwards, especially with regards to interoperability with browsers other than MSIE (every iteration has broken something or another) and core features. It's clear that Microsoft's strategy is to push people to pay for the premium Hotmail Plus service and to do that it's happy to let the free service atrophy to the minimum possible standards. Meanwhile, with Gmail the focus seems to be on providing as good a HTML-based email application as possible.
I haven't had as much experience of Yahoo's mail service (I've got an account, but only because one was created automatically when I wanted to use another of their services) but from what I've seen it's little different to Hotmail.
Gmail wins vs Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, etc in so many ways. The interface, the features (message threads, labels, etc) are just superior to what the competition has to offer and it's these reasons rather than the default account size that makes Gmail the best at what it does.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
AT&T worldnet just raised their email storage limit from 10Mb to 25Mb. Woohoo.
01/20/09
It's the functionality. To me, Gmail is more "stealthy" in its approach. It's just slick, fast, and doesn't force itself on me. "Labels" are truely innovative and implemented very well. "Search" is extremely flexible and useful. It is these features that help leverage the 1GB of storage into a really great tool.
Now, I admit that Yahoo does offer a very nice email service, and its features are very complete, but I simply cannot stand the ads. Gmail's unobtrusive ads are far better from a user's perspective.
Now, if Google would only fix their damned Forward function. If I receive a Rich Tect formatted or HTML formatted email, Gmail WILL NOT FORWARD IT without mangling the formatting (ie: it only forwards plain text.) This single problem prevents me from recommending Gmail to less-than-tech-savvy people, and unfortunatly, complaints and suggestions have fallen on deaf ears....
-Jim
GmailTips.com
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
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.
Yahoo also appends an advertisement to the bottom of messages you send out.
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 know you're just trying to be funny, but actually Yahoo doesn't count the stuff in its spam box towards your 250mb total, so you already didn't actually have to empty it unless you wanted to. I don't know if the new TOS with the gig will change this though.
I use Adblock for Firefox.
Now I don't see graphical ads in yahoo mail.
I just went a few rounds with hotmail's CSRs- the mail search feature has disappeared.
So I wrote and asked, and they said after 10 meg you can no longer search in the message body, just subject and to/from.
They then point to a little known clause in section 11 of their TOS- Hotmail can do anything to their service they want to without informing said end users.
Full conversational email available (in broken indian-ese) if you'd like it.
Yahoo mail also allows POP3 access.
w er=13273
Google does allow this as well, I just did it for my home and work computer 1 month ago, below is the attached site that shows you how to do so.
http://gmail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?ans