Yahoo to Offer Unlimited Email Storage

Josh Fink writes to tell us that Yahoo has announced that they will be offering unlimited email storage starting this coming May. The launch is all a part of Yahoo's ten year anniversary. While not all users will see their storage caps disappear right away Yahoo is promising that this feature will eventually reach their entire population.

Comments

New business plan

[Harmonious Botch]

1) Offer backup services for a modest fee 2) Mail them to my yahoo account 3) profit

Re:New business plan

[iadude1010]

cp internet* mylogin@yahoo.com backups are good

Re:New business plan

[Anonymous Coward]

mark this day on your calendar: the day slashdot died after Harmonious Botch discovered a way to effectively modify your original post by using the sig.

Re:New business plan

[timster]

You must be really, REALLY new here.

Re:New business plan

[Viper Daimao]

Finally a storage that can hold all my porn!

Re:New business plan

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't restore my backups, ads.doubleclick.net is down again! NooOOooooo!

Re:New business plan

[Ngarrang]

There has got to be some small print. It is Yahoo!, there's just gotta be.

Personally, I would be happier if they would apply all their resources to better spam prevention. I had to retire my long-time Yahoo! account due to more spam than real messages. I dutifully reported all spam via the SPAM button, to no real effect. Yahoo's policies for putting ads in messages is also a tad disruptive.

Yahoo has already lost me as a customer, but maybe this "unlimited" storage deal with draw some new untainted blood to them.

Re:New business plan

[Tim Browse]

People still view slashdot sigs? I turned them off after the n'th movie spoiler I saw.

Re:New business plan

[mha]

I get about 30-50 spam messages per day on my Yahoo account. Not more than 1 per day get into my inbox, all others end up in the spam folder - I am very satisfied with their spam selection.

Second, they lost you as a "customer"??? How much did you pay them for the free Email account??? This is preposterous, complaining about their ads but being unwilling to pay anything (there are no ads when you get a plus account).

Re:New business plan

[rainman_bc]

I would be happier if they would apply all their resources to better spam prevention.

Like another poster pointed out, I too have had little trouble with yahoo's spam filters. And nowadays spammers are so obvious that a simple right click -> this is spam and you're done. It's hardly a bother at all, and I've seen only one false positive come along. I'm pretty impressed.

Re:New business plan

[alisson]

Step two is much too involved. Try something more like this:

Step One: Get Yahoo Account
Step Two:
Step Three: Profits!

Re:New business plan

[Ngarrang]

I was one of those rare people who paid (albeit, a small fee) for premium service. At the time, I needed the larger inbox, the lack of ads and increased number of filters.

I was a paying customer. I think I earned the right to criticize.

Re:New business plan

[Ngarrang]

I would be happier if they would apply all their resources to better spam prevention.

Like another poster pointed out, I too have had little trouble with yahoo's spam filters. And nowadays spammers are so obvious that a simple right click -> this is spam and you're done. It's hardly a bother at all, and I've seen only one false positive come along. I'm pretty impressed. My account was created in the first year of Yahoo! Mail. My spam folder was huge on a daily basis. Despite Yahoo's "obvious" filtering, I was still selecting 30 messages a day in my inbox for spam reporting. YEMV (Your Environment May Vary)

Re:New business plan

[Lord Flipper]

There has got to be some small print. It is Yahoo!, there's just gotta be.

I don't know about 'fine print', but there is sub-text, and it goes like this: "We have the world's shittiest SPAM filtering, and, frankly, we need the space!"

Re:New business plan

[mcrbids]

Yeah, I can just see the so-called 'executives' at work:

I'm bigger!

Yeah? I'm bigger times ten!

Yeah? I'm bigger times a thousand!

Yeah? I'm bigger times a million!

Yeah? I'm bigger times a million million!

Yeah? I'm bigger times a million billion trillion!

Yeah? I'm bigger times infinity!

And then ... Profit!!

Re:New business plan

[tomerbd]

Now that Yahoo is unlimited in mailbox size, dont be limited by the attachment 10MB file size, you can send any file with any file size to your email account with a simple right click and send file (including yahoo). The freeware will automatically split and merge the file. You can also send whole folders to your email account as it will zip them up. The software is called Backup To EMail and you can download it from http://emailer.zapto.org/

Nice idea.

[crazyjeremy]

I am offering unlimited free $1 bills to anyone who leaves intelligent replies to this comment. While I may not send yours to you right away I will try to send it eventually.

Re:Nice idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

I beg to disagree with your assertion that you will send unlimited $1 bills to posters of intelligent comments. I move that the set of all existing dollar bills is countable, since it has a one-to-one correspondence with the algebraic group Z. Ergo, by modus ponens, you cannot have unlimited dollar bills. If you did, a simple reductio ad absurdum dictates that they'd have no value, and therefore I would not want them anyway.

Re:Nice idea.

[icepick72]

Unlimited $1 bills, or unlimited pennies, or unlimited $20 bills, or unlimited flecks of gold ... does it really matter if indeed it is unlimited?

Re:Nice idea.

[eric_brissette]

Takes one to know one!

Re:Nice idea.

[Dunbal]

If you did, a simple reductio ad absurdum dictates that they'd have no value, and therefore I would not want them anyway.

      Bravo Sir, stated like a true Nerd!

      PSST: I'll have his!

Re:Nice idea.

[nuzak]

Unlimited manure would probably be less desirable.

Re:Nice idea.

[kirun]

You do realise that the rollout of the previous upgrades in mailbox size didn't all happen in one go as well, right? I seemed to be one of the last people to get them, maybe due to my infrequent usage (mostly news from sites I signed up to five years ago). Anyway, I hope you could console me by placing me at the head of the queue for some money. Thanks.

Re:Nice idea.

[nine-times]

Yes, it matters. I'd much rather have 20 million dollars in $20 bills than in pennies.

Re:Nice idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. It could be an unlimited number of bills, each charging you $1. That is significantly different from sending you unlimited pennies, with which you could set up a brothel and become a millionaire.

Re:Nice idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

Please send me one!

Re:Nice idea.

[aesiamun]

Only if counting unlimited pennies and rolling them or storing unlimited $1 bills is worthwhile.

I'd rather unlimited $20 bills or $50 bills please.

How would this work? Would you just accept a phone call stating "I need more (insert monetary value of choice), please?". Do you ship for free or do you deduct the shipping amount from the amount you send? What if I just ask you to send me 100,000 $20 bills every day...would that work? Automatically assume I need more everyday and just ship.

Or maybe I'm just taking this too far...and then I'd not be receiving my unlimited currency.

Re:Nice idea.

[Sosarian]

I'll take your unlimited dollar bills, but I want free shipping and handling thrown in too.

Re:Nice idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

me too

Re:Nice idea.

[Jimmy King]

This lack of value assumes that everyone (or at least enough people) have unlimited $1 bills. If only you and the parent poster have unlimited $1 bills and everyone else in the world still has to work for their money as usual then it's not at all worthless and still quite the advantage.

Re:Nice idea.

[Pollardito]

You do realise that the rollout of the previous upgrades in mailbox size didn't all happen in one go as well, right?

exactly! the previous rollouts came out overtime as they put into place the infrastructure to handle the new size, so i anticipate that they will also roll this one out as infinite space becomes available for more and more users

does anyone know if there is any truth to the rumor that Google is going to save costs on storing gmail accounts by storing everyone's email in one huge Yahoo mail account?

Re:Nice idea.

[whoever57]

I am offering unlimited free $1 bills

Is that bill as in "bank note" or bill as in "invoice"?

Re:Nice idea.

[God'sDuck]

Unlimited manure would probably be less desirable.

Depends -- does it have to be sent to *my* address?

Re:Nice idea.

[saider]

Just charge $1.05 for shipping and handling.

Re:Nice idea.

[Profane MuthaFucka]

We do indeed have unlimited 1$ bills. It's just that you can't have them all at once for free. The number of bills is unlimited, but you can only have a certain number of them right now. Typically this rate at which the bills are fed to you depends on factors such as employment negotiations and attendance at a job. Also, the stream of bills is often (usually) (OK, always) terminated eventually by the death of the recipient. Less common is the death of the dollar bill provider. The US Treasury is still operating the printing presses, so speculation about the limitations of dollar bills due to the nonexistence of the US Treasury or their printing presses is mere speculation.

To summarize: dollar bills are unlimited. If you want unlimited dollar bills, get a job, go to work, and don't die.

Re:Nice idea.

[hostyle]

or bill as in hooker?

Re:Nice idea.

[icepick72]

Unless you could turn said manure into an unlimited alternative fuel source and make billions or more on it.

Re:Nice idea.

[RealGrouchy]

Unlimited $1 bills, or unlimited pennies, or unlimited $20 bills, or unlimited flecks of gold ... does it really matter if indeed it is unlimited?

That depends on whether the unlimited drink machine takes bills.

- RG>

Re:Nice idea.

[Plutonite]

Only to a mathematician. Uncountably infinite things are more numerous than countably infinite ones. Even though there is nothing uncountable in this case, there is still a hierarchy of infinities that may relate to the $1 vs $20 question.

Re:Nice idea.

[icepick72]

But you'd be unlimited in riches and could therefore easily turn the pesky matter of handling multitudes of pennies over to somebody else. Just pay them a lot to do it and give them a shovel, even in return for as much access as they want to your unlimited pennies because it's not hurting you any.

Re:Nice idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

bill hooker?

Re:Nice idea.

[AndersOSU]

Wouldn't that only be a problem if intelligent comments on slashdot were not countable? I've been counting since sometime in 2004, and I've still got plenty of unused fingers.

Re:Nice idea.

[cptgrudge]

I've been counting since sometime in 2004, and I've still got plenty of unused fingers.

Don't be modest. Everyone likes the smell of their own brand.

Re:Nice idea.

[fyoder]

Unlimited $1 bills, or unlimited pennies, or unlimited $20 bills, or unlimited flecks of gold ... does it really matter if indeed it is unlimited?

Yup, because the pipe itself is limited, they're not offering petabytes a second. I would opt for the pipe full of twenties over the pipe full of pennies. Don't go for the flecks of gold, though, as they'll fill up the air, you'll be breathing them in, and then you'll die of gold lung.

Re:Nice idea.

[ToadMan8]

They will make unlimited the quotas of users who are nowhere near the quota. Then as a user nears the existing quota, they will be again found in the "not yet unlimited" group ;)

Re:Nice idea.

[nine-times]

But then they'd have equal access to unlimited pennies, and they would make a similar deal with someone else to shovel the unlimited pennies. This chain would continue until everyone had access to the pennies, and because of this, the pennies would be worthless, and no one would ever shovel them.

Re:Nice idea.

[operagost]

If the $20 million were in the face value of USA pennies prior to 1982, you'd really have over $44 million. A very unwieldy $44 million.

Re:Nice idea.

[operagost]

Except I forgot about the recent law prohibiting the melting of pennies. Bleh. Well, maybe there will be a 1909 S-VDB in there.

Re:Nice idea.

[AliasMarlowe]

Unlimited $1 bills, or unlimited pennies, or unlimited $20 bills, or unlimited flecks of gold ... does it really matter if indeed it is unlimited? How about a bank draft for an unlimited number of Ostmarks, or its equivalent in dollars? An unlimited amount of nothing is nothing.

Re:Nice idea.

[SeaFox]

Unlimited $1 bills, or unlimited pennies, or unlimited $20 bills, or unlimited flecks of gold ... does it really matter if indeed it is unlimited?

Only if the financial world find out they're unlimited before I have a chance to spend them.

Re:Nice idea.

[Gentlewhisper]

How about a bank draft for an unlimited number of Ostmarks, or its equivalent in dollars? An unlimited amount of nothing is nothing.

As waste paper they are still worth something.

Re:Nice idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlimited $1 bills, or unlimited pennies, or unlimited $20 bills, or unlimited flecks of gold ... does it really matter if indeed it is unlimited?

Yes, the unlimited flecks of gold are heavier.

Re:Nice idea.

[glittalogik]

That'd take time though. In the meantime, you'd be able to afford a PS3!

Re:Nice idea.

[blubadger]

Unlimited sand? You probably wouldn't want that. He probably meant: "I will offer a $1 bill to each person who leaves an intelligent reply to this comment, without limit." Which should be affordable, as there is only one intelligent reply so far.

Re:Nice idea.

[0123456789]

Where?
This is /.; intelligent comments should be taken outside and shot!

Re:Nice idea.

[Bertie]

I dunno, I quite like the idea of taking a swim in my savings, like Scrooge McDuck.

Re:Nice idea.

[Farley986]

I agree with what you said. What is the reasoning behind an unlimited amount of email storage? How much stuff can one possibly store on their email? And even if people can and do use a lot of space I'm positive that around 90 percent or so of what they have in their "unlimited" email accounts is hardly if ever used. Basically with unlimited space you don't have to delete anything sent to you...

When will Google follow?

[Tim_F]

It would be really nice for Google to finally do this as well. I wonder if they would be able to roll it out to everyone at the same time?

Re:When will Google follow?

[pembo13]

why?

Re:When will Google follow?

[aegisalpha]

"You are currently using 345 MB (12%) of your 2833 MB."

They'd better do it quickly!

Re:When will Google follow?

[Simon Garlick]

Unlike Yahoo, Google doesn't need to offer unlimited space. You see, unlike Yahoo, Google has spam filtering that actually WORKS.

Re:When will Google follow?

[cp.tar]

Actually, Google promised to one-up on that offer two years ago...

So now we wait.

Do I really need more Yahoo Space?

[lecithin]

One of my yahoo addresses I have had for about 9 years. I just opened it up and looked:

Inbox - 7145 UNREAD messages (99% spam)
Bulk - 2547 UNREAD messages (about 99% spam)

Obviously, I don't use this account all that much. My point is that at least in my case, this extra storage will be just wasted.

I read this as a marketing move that really won't do a thing for me or many of the other users.

Re:Do I really need more Yahoo Space?

[flynt]

Isn't it killing you that you have 71 legit messages in there?

Re:Do I really need more Yahoo Space?

[nine-times]

Of course it's a marketing move. Gmail's 2GB was also a marketing move. Many people won't fill 20 MB of e-mail in a year, but they'll still switch to a provider that offers large/unlimited mailboxes just so that they don't have to worry about running out of space.

Re:Do I really need more Yahoo Space?

[rhartness]

Not really. They probably won't even increase the storage size of there servers any more than they typically do. My guess is that they've noticed that most users (probably in the neighborhood of 99.99%) aren't anywhere close to their max usage and that offering this 'feature' is good simply for advertising and attracting new customers. The really limit is the size of the individual emails themselves. If you are limited to 5MB of space/per email, you would have to have about 25k 5MB emails to fill one TB. That's not going to happen, even if your account is a ten year old spam catcher.

Re:Do I really need more Yahoo Space?

[suv4x4]

My point is that at least in my case, this extra storage will be just wasted.

I wonder, when we're talking about unlimited and dynamic storage, can we ever talk about "extra storage being wasted". It kinda clashes with my logical units.

They don't pre-allocate infinite number of bytes for your account, which will go "wasted".

The only thing that changes is their marketing message, nothing really goes to waste, as the usage pattern of the majority of users won't change a zilch.

Re:Do I really need more Yahoo Space?

[tompaulco]

You prompted me to check my yahoo account as well. Here is what mine says:

Your Yahoo! Mail account is no longer active.
Why is my account inactive?

Yahoo! Mail deactivated your mail account because:

* You have not logged into your mail account during the past four months; or
* You have requested that Yahoo! Mail deactivate your account.

What does this mean?

* All email messages, folders, attachments and preferences have been deleted and cannot be recovered.
* All messages sent to ptomko@yahoo.com are being returned to the sender.
* You can still use your Yahoo! ID to access other registered services on Yahoo!.

I log in to Yahoo everyday, but apparently have not logged in to the mail server in awhile.

Re:Do I really need more Yahoo Space?

[Pollardito]

They don't pre-allocate infinite number of bytes for your account, which will go "wasted". they don't pre-allocate space, but the amount of spam that can accumulate in accounts that are effectively dead has no ceiling now. i wonder if they're limiting the amount of unread email that an account can accumulate just to give them a boundary that they can put onto accounts like that?

Re:Do I really need more Yahoo Space?

[Zwaxy]

1 TB is around 1,000GB or 1,000,000MB.

1,000,000MB / 5MB = 200,000.

I can't see how you could be wrong by a factor of 8. Can you? Did the 8-bits-per-byte thing trip you up? I can't see where else an 8 might have got involved here.

Re:Do I really need more Yahoo Space?

[rhartness]

But you see... 1024MB/GB * 1024GB/TB = 1,048,576 1,048,476 / 5 = 209,715.2 *GASP*... You caught me on a math error that is so blatently obvious that I feel that I must admit the truth-- I used a calculator instead of my mind. Must have been a typo when I entered in the figures. Sorry...

Re:Do I really need more Yahoo Space?

[damiam]

If they compress their message store, then the amount of space used by spam messages (which are presumably duplicated close to identically in thousands of inboxes) drops drastically.

Re:Do I really need more Yahoo Space?

[Zwaxy]

I haven't used mine for years, so I thought I'd have a look.

After telling me that the new interface wouldn't work with javascript and offering to show me the old interface, it then showed me this:

  No Unread Messages
      You are using 0% of your 1.0GB MB limit
      Go to Inbox or Check Other Mail
      Yahoo! Mail gives you 1.0GB MB for free!
      Would you like to buy a 10MB, 25MB, 50MB or 100MB mailbox?

So not only is the storage going to be infinite, it's also 2 dimensional, currently offering me 1.0GB MB (that's 1024 megabytes squared, right?)!

I can't see why anyone would want to buy a 10MB mailbox when the 1.0GB MB mailbox is free...

Re:Do I really need more Yahoo Space?

[Splab]

HA! 20MB? A lot of people fill that in a week. at work the central IT department has limited the amount of email you are allowed to have to 50MB. We get tons of support requests from people with filled up accounts.

Re:Do I really need more Yahoo Space?

[maxume]

So did you mistype 200,000 as 25k, or did you mistype 209,000 as 25k? That's well within the realm of a brain fart, but it ain't no typo.

Re:Do I really need more Yahoo Space?

[rhartness]

The typo came when I typed in the numbers into the calculator. I missed a digit and it threw it off.

Re:Do I really need more Yahoo Space?

[MMC Monster]

More likely the spam filter was wrong about 1% of the time. :-)

Re:Do I really need more Yahoo Space?

[Endo13]

Yahoo has its own spam filter. Spam messages automatically get put into the Junk Mail folder. Anything in this folder gets deleted once it's been there 30 days.

Re:Do I really need more Yahoo Space?

[Endo13]

Erm, sorry, "Junk Mail folder" should read "Bulk folder".

Re:Do I really need more Yahoo Space?

[operagost]

Maybe the policy is wrong. I have maintained a few Exchange systems, and even 2000 was solid enough to hold many gigabytes of mail. Let's not even get into the incredible economy of large RAID-5 volumes using inexpensive SATA or SAS disks that are still faster than last year's high-end SCSI disks.

Re:Do I really need more Yahoo Space?

[Zwaxy]

I see... if you miss one of the zeroes...

Python 2.4.4 (#2, Jan 13 2007, 17:50:26)
>>> 1024 * 124 / 5 / 1000
25
>>> ... you can get 25. Case closed. :)

Re:Do I really need more Yahoo Space?

[ScrewMaster]

72. You missed the one from his ex-wife's new boyfriend.

Re:Do I really need more Yahoo Space?

[zsau]

After a period of time (tree months? ninety days?) of going unchecked, Yahoo! Mail accounts stop receiving new mail and need to be reactivated. At least, that's happened to mine a few times... (It, too, is spammed to death, and Yahoo!'s antispam mechanisms are worse than nothing.)

Too bad we've already got gmail

[atomicthumbs]

I've tried Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Mail Beta. They were actually my first email accounts. Somebody sent me a gmail invite a few years ago and I've never looked back. The yahoo interface is AWFUL.

Re:Too bad we've already got gmail

[vivaoporto]

So true. Not only that, but I configured Thunderbird to retrieve email from Gmail POP server, work like a charm for me and my miss. No more slow advertisement before to read my precious email, just one click on "Get" and voilà, it's all there for me.

Re:Too bad we've already got gmail

[eln]

I actually like the old Yahoo interface: it's simple, clear, and easy to use. Also, the ads are easy to block.

The new Beta is terrible, though. It's slow as hell, and it's so cluttered with useless "Web 2.0" cruft that the actual viewing area for the message is ridiculously tiny. If they decide to switch to that format permanently, and don't give an option to keep using the old interface, I am going to have to stop using Yahoo for my email. That would really suck, since I've been using that email address for 10 years.

Re:Too bad we've already got gmail

[denis-The-menace]

FYI: The Yahoo beta also doesn't work in Mozilla v1.7, you need firefox 1.x and up.

Re:Too bad we've already got gmail

[jimjamjoh]

Except that yours is a minority opinion: CNET and PC Magazine both gave glowing assessments.

I use the new Y! Mail Beta too, and the reviews are right, it IS faster, and the "Web 2.0 cruft" that you disdain has markedly improved the usability of the interface (drag 'n drop messages into folders, yeah, who would want that?!).

Re:Too bad we've already got gmail

[Seumas]

Yeah, I don't care what Yahoo! offers. It's still Yahoo! email. I know how I snicker whenever I see someone email me from a yahoo address. Having a Yahoo! email account is a lot like having one of those K-Mart $5.95 dial up internet services.

Re:Too bad we've already got gmail

[Anonymous Coward]

i agree, whenever I someone emails me with a yahoo account, I immediately think "dumbfuck".

Re:Too bad we've already got gmail

[Xtravar]

I disagree. I prefer Yahoo Mail classic and beta to GMail. GMail's interface makes me feel lost and claustrophobic, for whatever legitimate or non-legitimate reasons.

Plus, I use a lot of other Yahoo services and being logged into Mail makes the others easier since they all authenticate the same way.

Re:Too bad we've already got gmail

[kastababy]

I would agree with you totally regarding this because I have Yahoo Mail and Gmail too, and I use Gmail for a good majority of my email communication, but you can't send certain Microsoft Office attachments on Gmail (like Access files is a PRIME example!!!) Until Google gets that little snafu straight, for schoolwork and stuff I'll stick with Yahoo!

Re:Too bad we've already got gmail

[rumplet]

Yes BUT yahoo are offering unlimited storage, whilst gmail only offers a paltry

format(((now-ts) / (CP[i][0]-ts) * (CP[i][1]-bs)) + bs); ..which is much less.

Re:Too bad we've already got gmail

[Anonymous Coward]

Who the hell besides idiot n00bz use yahoo?? Gmail simply offers more without bombarding you with ads and crap. It just simply WORKS.

Re:Too bad we've already got gmail

[Anonymous Coward]

Try running it at HD resolution. It's a completely unusable piece of crap in both firefox and IE. All that fancy scripting might be nice, but the layout was written by a moron.

Re:Too bad we've already got gmail

[ACMENEWSLLC]

>>I've tried Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Mail Beta. They were actually my first email accounts. Somebody sent me a gmail invite a few years ago and I've never looked back. The yahoo interface is AWFUL.

To each his own. I prefer YaHoo. I like have many notes, calendar items & reminders, and many things I can't do with Google. Yes, I am aware there is a calendar and Docs. But the workflow/features just don't do what I need.

Plus I like Norton AV better than Sophos :P

Re:Too bad we've already got gmail

[cmacb]

I use the new Y! Mail Beta too, and the reviews are right, it IS faster, and the "Web 2.0 cruft" that you disdain has markedly improved the usability of the interface (drag 'n drop messages into folders, yeah, who would want that?!).

Faster than what? Certainly not faster than Gmail. Maybe faster than the old Yahoo interface, but my guess is that it is because it is on newer, less overloaded (so far) servers, because while the web 2.0 techniques have usability advantages I don't think there is any performance (server side) benefit from having the server being hit with hundreds of small transactions in the background.

My experience with the new Yahoo web interface so far is: (1) I requested it shortly after it was announced (which was way back in 2000 or so I think, not just recently) (2) I requested a Hotmail web 2.0 ID about the same time, and I was an early user of Gmail. (3) I much preferred Gmail to the Hotmail equivalent for speed and lack of advertising clutter. (4) I continued to wait for my beta Yahoo mail. (5) Hotmail improved a bit, but was very finicky about browsers (I don't/won't use Windows or IE). (6) Two years passed and I still wasn't on the Yahooo Beta list (7) Gmail added more storage and continued to improve with addition of Calendar, Docs, web pages, feed readers, all relatively well integrated. (8) Hotmail improved too, I think in fact they already claim limitless storage. I wonder what is considered new about the Yahoo concept? (9) It takes 9 months (last time I checked) for a Gmail id to expire from non-use. A long illness, sabbatical or Summer vacation and your yahoo mail is gone, in all its infinitude. (10) finally last year I got on the Yahoo beta. It was slow, but, as I said faster than the VERY slow older interface. (11) You still can't POP mail from Yahoo without paying $20/year. It's called lock-in. I avoid lock-in. Same is true of MS. (12) AOL came out with a far superior Web 2.0 webmail (also free) before I got approved for Yahoo beta. AOL's also has IMAP support (better than POP in several ways) and has drag and drop, etc. (13) All of them Gmail, Hotmail, AOL (aka AIM mail) are reliable, Yahoo frequently crashes on me, tells me the server is down, and just recently told me my browser was not supported (same browser I had been using for it all along). (14) Yahoo's spam filtering should be renamed "spam injection". As others have mentioned there is no excuse for getting e-mail messages from next year. I get spam from the same addresses that I've flagged as spam dozens of time in the past. Just last night I tried to go though the inbox and dutifully flag the spam without accidentally flagging the few legitimate messages, but in clicking delete too fast I must have overloaded their servers, which subsequently became totally unavailable.

I don't know what's up with CNET and PC Magazine, but the fact that they regularly give awards to Yahoo and Microsoft for products that everyone knows are seriously flawed, while failing to even mention others (AOL mail a very good example) tells me it has nothing to do with actually using the products. I no longer go to these sources for reviews, and am often suspect of their news coverage. Their future looks as bright as Yahoo's.

Re:Too bad we've already got gmail

[Zwaxy]

there is no excuse for getting e-mail messages from next year

That's not Yahoo's fault. On a few occasions I've received messages from next year. In one case the sender's kids had been messing with the system clock on the PC which had sent the mail. It wouldn't be right for Yahoo's Spam filter to have hidden those messages from me (although, I would have appreciated some way of not having them stay at the top of the list of messages for a year, other than deleting or filing them).

Re:Too bad we've already got gmail

[Anonymous Coward]

It's still better than a hotmail.com address.

Re:Too bad we've already got gmail

[Seumas]

Of course, the same can also be said about when you see an AOL user. But it sometimes just means they're less experienced or have a simpler need and use of the web. For me, however, "yahoo account" makes me immediately think "possible fraud or troublemaker", because on my site over the last eight years, yahoo accounts have become the throwaway troublemaker's best friend.

I am not a huge fan of gmail, either. It's a great service but I hate the interface. I use it as a backup to my email server that I run on my hardware sitting at the colo in case that is ever down - and thanks to pop.gmail.com, I don't ever have to use the gmail interface.

I think it says something about a person when they would rather subject themselves to a crapload of advertisements and shoddy complex interfaces designed to shove them into a million different pay services like Yahoo's interface does when they could have a relatively unintrusive interface and advertising situation for free elsewhere.

Re:Too bad we've already got gmail

[mha]

Firefox and the "Adblock Plus" add-on - what ads are you talking about? I don't see no ads anywhere, not even in any Yahoo pages incl. my Yahoo mail interface ;-)

Re:Too bad we've already got gmail

[GnuAge]

I configured Thunderbird to retrieve email from Gmail POP server, work like a charm

You can download Yahoo email to a POP3 email client with some program like YPOPS. It's slow and a bit more of a hassle, though.

When Yahoo stopped offering free POP3 email I stopped using Yahoo as a regular email account that I regularly checked. Now my Yahoo address is what I use for e-commerce, etc., places where I need a working account and might want to check my order status occasionally, but I don't want to get weekly promotional spam from the merchants for the rest of my life.

Re:Too bad we've already got gmail

[cshay]

I'm exactly in your shoes. 10 years of yahoo mail, and I'll quit if the the original is ever removed as an option. Are you listening, Yahoo? :)

Re:Too bad we've already got gmail

[ralmin]

(11) You still can't POP mail from Yahoo without paying $20/year. It's called lock-in. I avoid lock-in. Same is true of MS.

Not if you use Yahoo Australia (mail.yahoo.com.au). I use Yahoo POP mail all the time and I've never paid them a cent.

Here are the settings you'll need.

Server Settings
Incoming Mail Server (POP3): pop.mail.yahoo.com.au
Use SSL, port: 995

Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP): smtp.mail.yahoo.com.au
Use SSL, port: 465, use authentication

Account Name/Username: ******
Email address: ******@yahoo.com.au
Password: Your Yahoo!7 Mail password

Even though it says you should use SSL on those ports given, in fact it works with normal plain-text POP3 on port 110 as well. And you can just use your ISP's SMTP server to send mail if you like.

Re:Too bad we've already got gmail

[zsau]

That would really suck, since I've been using that email address for 10 years.

Yahoo! does free POP access and forwarding. You can keep using it, without the cruft. I used to use this until they started filtering mail into the bulk folder on a random basis, but I had too much spam to be able to get by without a filter.

Re:Too bad we've already got gmail

[I_M_Noman]

Who the hell besides idiot n00bz use yahoo??

Me, for one. For ten years now. Hardly a "n00b".

Gmail simply offers more

More than what? All e-mail services provide the same things (compose, send, forward, reply, archive, categorize -- whether labels or folders -- , delete), and last time I checked, Yahoo! mail did those things. (In a couple of cases, it's easier to do in Yahoo! than in Gmail.) And Yahoo!'s spam filtering is just fine, thankyewverymuch.

I really have to stop feeding the trolls.

So all I need is a little script,

[advocate_one]

a cron job to run it and I can do an incremental backup EVERY night to my email account... pity my upstream bandwidth is so crap though...

worth nothing

[denisbergeron]

I have 4 emails accounts (one for me, one for my wife, 1 for each of my children) I all of them I can't read email older than a month.
Each time I try, Yahoo send me a showemail.html with 0 bytes !
Now, I can have a unlimited old email of 0 bytes !
Yah right ! Nice try Yahoo !

So?

[Brian Ribbon]

Unless this offer runs until 2027, I don't think it's necessary.

I'd like a couple ...

[tekkguy]

I'd like a couple of those unlimited GB hard drives. You know, just in case I fill one of them up ... oh, wait. Nevermind.

Re:I'd like a couple ...

[Gibberx]

Nah, go ahead and get two, for redundancy. :)

Re:I'd like a couple ...

[nicething]

With an infinite number of unlimited-storage drives, you could use the RAID Controller of God to store the BLUEPRINTS OF ALL CREATION.

You'd probably want to store them in a rackmount enclosure tall enough to reach into heaven.

Re:I'd like a couple ...

[KozmoStevnNaut]

You'd better hope they come pre-formatted, otherwise you'd probably have to wait for oh say, an eternity for mk2fs to finish ;-)

Fantastic!

[Dunbal]

Great! Now I know where to store all that kittie po...uhh, nevermind.

Re:Fantastic!

[nine-times]

Kittie or Kiddie? Either way.... you sick bastard!

Re:Fantastic!

[LearnToSpell]

(I just had to Google...)

http://www.lectos.net/hellokitty.php4

Re:Fantastic!

[networkBoy]

Parent NSFW

Re:Fantastic!

[Dunbal]

Kittie or Kiddie? Either way.... you sick bastard!

      I can't help it! I just can't get enough of that pussy...

Re:Fantastic!

[Anonymous Coward]

When I pray, one or more of the three cats in the house jump up in my lap and start purring. At first I couldn't figure it out. Were these spiritual cats? You know, like the old Wiccans had their familiars, and in the dark ages any woman with a cat was subsequently hanged for being a witch?

Then I figured it out. God got so used to me praying for pussy that whenever he hears me talking to him he just automatically throws a couple of cats to me.

Re:Fantastic!

[hritcu]

4. Still no free forwarding

Re:Fantastic!

[sootman]

'Sucks' is in the eye of the beholder. Here are my favorite Yahoo! features that kill Gmail:
- one click to sort by sender, size, date, subject*
- I can open messages in tabs or new windows

Paid-for service removes on-screen and in-message ads. I'm sure some people see it as a shortcoming of Gmail that they *don't* give the option to pay money for no ads. $20/year? The service is good and I don't mind paying for extra features (more storage, more filters, no ads in outgoing messages, choice of return addresses.)

That said, I prefer Yahoo's old interface to the beta. I hope they never get rid of it. Then again, it's not like the structure of email will drastically change, so they should be able to keep the old interface alive forever.

* Seriously--am I blind, or is this most basic of all features missing? Am I the only one who does this?

Re:Fantastic!

[isorox]

store all that kittie po...

kittie poo?

Re:Fantastic!

[shellbeach]

Seriously--am I blind, or is this most basic of all features missing? Am I the only one who does this? No need to sort by subject when you've got a client that supports threads ...

Re:Fantastic!

[sootman]

I've never liked threaded views much. And it sure does make evaluating spam easier when you're looking at a hundred messages a time and can see that blocks of 5 or 10 have identical subjects.

Also, threads won't show me my largest messages. And sometimes I want to sort by sender to see all the *different* things we've talked about. Etc etc etc. Conversation threads and search ability aren't the answer to everything. Some people work well with lists. I'm one of them.

Too Little Too Late

[deadmongrel]

I had been using yahoo Mail since 1997. Yahoo had the best(well atleast to me) email service for years. Then they decided to go with flash based in-your-face ads. Then they came up with an desktop client look-alike which was bulky and pain in the neck. I am never going back to yahoo mail.

By sacrificing usability Yahoo! wanted to make a quick buck. Bad choice and unfortunately Yahoo! did not learn from hotmail. I am still amazed at how many people still use hotmail.

Re:Too Little Too Late

[imaginaryelf]

Amen. The "new" email interface is so slow and heavy.

They pulled the same to crap to tv.yahoo.com.

Yahoo should remember, "Don't fix it if it ain't broke!"

Re:Too Little Too Late

[hey!]

Yahoo and Gmail have two different approaches. Yahoo tries to be more integrated from the get go. Early on they provided a combination of email, full featured PIM, on line file storage and notepad. It's actually quite a useful set of features. I also like that I can synchronize PIM data with my PDA.

Google's approach to integration is more incremental. They build an application more or less as a stand alone entity. The result is that if email is the only thing you really care about, Gmail provides a far cleaner interface.

The pitfall with Yahoo's approach is that it is inherently more complex. It doesn't help that the first versions of their beta interface were horribly slow, but the worst decision was acting as if this were the late 90s and trying to be the user's portal to the Internet. Not that there is anything wrong with trying, but when the user wants his email, he doesn't want to wait for the top stories from sports and entertainment to load. Making the user wait for content he hasn't asked for to get content he has asked for was a bad, bad mistake.

Overall Yahoo offers a better package of services. Google provides better individual services when it has a comparable offering. If you just want email, Google is the choice for you. Yahoo should be a viable alternative, but they've chosen to magnify the downsides of their offering.

Re:Too Little Too Late

[BenjiTheGreat98]

Yeah, I actually started using AOL for something after Yahoo did that to their TV listings. http://tvlistings.aol.com/ isn't half bad.

Re:Too Little Too Late

[CastrTroy]

I agree. Yahoo ruled back when Hotmail was it's only major contendor. They were offering 250 MB accounts when hotmail still has 2MB accounts. That and their spam blocking was about 100 times better than hotmail. The only way to block a reasonable amount of spam with Hotmail is to use the whitelist. I don't have any whitelists/blacklists for Yahoo and I hardly ever get spam in my inbox, despite getting tons of spam everyday. The clunky new interface is terrible. Good thing that's only beta and you can still use the old one.

Re:Too Little Too Late

[yog]

I haven't noticed the usability decline that you cite. I used to pay for the premium Yahoo mail, then stopped paying when Google competition forced Yahoo to offer more storage. With Firefox and Flashblock, I don't notice any in-my-face flash ads, and the new beta interface is actually pretty good, with drag-n-drop capability which is actually rather cool. I don't understand why people in this forum are so negative about Yahoo; it's free, it works, and it ties in nicely with their many other services.

A while back I switched to gmail.com for my web-based mail simply because gmail offers free pop3 services while Yahoo was still charging for pop access. Perhaps that's changed. I miss Yahoo mail though because I prefer the folder paradigm to gmail's label approach, and Yahoo has superior filtering for my purposes. But, it's all just eye candy to me anyway; I still use a Linux shell account and trusty old Emacs as my primary mail system.

Re:Too Little Too Late

[AliasTheRoot]

Yahoo! has IMAP interfaces for its mail, i've had an account for 5 years or so and only ever use the web interface when i'm on the road.

Re:Too Little Too Late

[DatAsian]

I'm using it because Hotmail keeps giving me random features that are useful. I think I had the account since 1998 (?) and hopped on Outlook when Hotmail and Outlook worked together. They upped storage and gave me free Outlook connectivity. Haven't used the web-based interface in a while except when I am away from home/work.

Re:Too Little Too Late

[mad.frog]

Really? I have never found info on that. I'd gladly pay for Yahoo mail if I could access it via IMAP in addition to webmail. Can you provide a link?

Re:Too Little Too Late

[Ilgaz]

Amen. The "new" email interface is so slow and heavy.

They pulled the same to crap to tv.yahoo.com.

Yahoo should remember, "Don't fix it if it ain't broke!" Same goes for http://cm.my.yahoo.com/ (My Yahoo Beta) , it is like a virus spreading all over yahoo.com! No kidding. I hope the same genius (!) doesn't get the idea of "lets make these betas final and remove the working ones".

Serious, it can happen.

ps: About Gmail? I don't trade my privacy for POP3 in 2007

"At some undefined point..."

[feepness]

More fodder for quantum computing?... another NP complete problem to add to the list...

Maybe 12 year anniversary

[carlivar]

Where does this anniversary stuff come from? Yahoo's 10 year anniversary was TWO YEARS AGO. Maybe this is a 12 year anniversary feature!

Re:Maybe 12 year anniversary

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the 10 year anniversary of Yahoo email.

It's like the infinite improbability machine...

[physicsboy500]

You just feed the storage media into itself and boom... infinite storage!

unlimited

[flynt]

Whenever something says 'unlimited', don't you just want to know, "What really is the limit?"

Re:unlimited

[Spudtrooper]

If it really were "unlimited," they would probably attract more attention by saying "1 terabyte" or "10 terabytes" or "ONE MILLION terabytes." "Unlimited" just sounds less impressive than a huge limit.

And for all those complaining about the ads on Gmail, try the CustomizeGoogle plug-in for Firefox. It even gets rid of the counter on the Spam box.

Re:unlimited

[192939495969798999]

We at /. don't just want to know 'what really is the limit', we will find out shortly! They have some spam filter that's supposed to short-circuit account abuse, so just fly a bit under that amount of email and keep the flow constant. First to 100 GB wins!

Re:unlimited

[tompaulco]

Whenever something says 'unlimited', don't you just want to know, "What really is the limit?"
Exactly. Like when I got my AmEx card and they said no limit (and still advertise as such on their commercials), I found that the limit was somewhere under $2000 because they wouldn't approve my charging a laptop on my AmEx. I eventually was able to raise my unlimited limit by faxing them a copy of my bank statement showing available funds in the bank.

Re:unlimited

[earnest murderer]

Just like the pancake house down the street says all you can eat, but they put the breaks on at 13ths.

Someone somewhere has just started work on an app. to "backup" your data to yahoo mail. By backup I mean a bittorrent app that never writes the bits to your own drive.

I kid, the service is so slow they'd never get into the double digits before closing.

Re:unlimited

[Altus]

2 grand for an unlimited card? was that a balance limit or a single transaction limit?

that seems totally absurd to me. I had a higher credit limit than that on my Master Card when I first got it.

Re:unlimited

[QuantumPion]

Unlimited as in human stupidity, or unlimited as in comcast/verizon/netflix/etc?

Re:unlimited

[krotkruton]

I'd bet it takes a week before someone finds out and crashes the whole thing.

This is obvious to most people who use online email, but one of the reasons I like gmail is because I can send myself pictures or projects and download them anywhere, so if I'm working on something on someone else's computer, I can get it to my home computer without any physical media or programs to install (not that there aren't other ways to do this, but its easy this way). There's talk of a cutoff point that checks for abusers, but if this is really unlimited storage, then shouldn't I be able to send a dvd to my email so I can download it and watch it on another computer (forget about the copyright or email technical issues)?

But anyway, I think I figured out what is going through the minds of the people at Yahoo. The service is completely unlimited for users, meaning that there are no limits, but they will deactivate your account if you storage goes over a certain threshold deemed abusive by Yahoo. As long as you don't pass the threshold, you won't have any limits! Mmmm, circular logic...

Re:unlimited

[UnanimousCoward]

IMHO, the more interesting thing is whether or not they up the attachment max. Otherwise, it's a bunch of lip service...

Re:unlimited

[attam]

i believe AMEX advertises "no preset spending limit." this is not the same as "no limit"

Re:unlimited

[amazon10x]

There's only one way to find out! I set up an account but it might take a bit to hit the "Unlimited" status. However, it starts at 1GB so we might as well get started right away. Send mail to TheLimitAsSlash.Approaches@yahoo.com. Be sure to add attachments!

Re:unlimited

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod this one up!

This could be FUN!

Re:unlimited

[tompaulco]

i believe AMEX advertises "no preset spending limit." this is not the same as "no limit".
You're right. It is WORSE than no limit, because you don't know whether or not they are going to deny your next bottle of soda purchase. But they advertise it as if it is some kind of advantage to the consumer. I think they are taking advantage of the fact that most people are going to assume that AmEx gives them no limit.

Re:unlimited

[that this is not und]

There are uuencode binaries for Windoze, even.

Re:unlimited

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I did hit that limit - in my case it was just over 7K. They don't randomly deny your transaction though. They just send you a letter asking you to slow down.

Re:unlimited

[Anonymous Coward]

Add this to your sig.be sure to post frequently.

Re:unlimited

[amazon10x]

Excellent idea. BTW, I checked the account: "4% of 1.0GB"

Re:unlimited

[winnabago]

Hey, set up a little web page or something, so we know. I'll send you 10MB every few hours!

Re:unlimited

[amazon10x]

You mean a webpage with a used space counter? I could try to set that up; I've got some free time tonight. Apparently Yahoo just made an open API for their mail.

Re:unlimited

[winnabago]

Yeah, with a little zero on one side and "infinity" on the other. We're redefining unlimited here, be creative!

there's always a price

[Ginger Unicorn]

i just had to switch to gmail today ,as yahoo decided to start charging £12 a year for POP access.

assholes.

Re:there's always a price

[deadmongrel]

I thought they started charging for pop3 access way back in 2002. I loved pop3 access since you can avoid all the junk ads on screen.

Re:there's always a price

[suv4x4]

i just had to switch to gmail today ,as yahoo decided to start charging £12 a year for POP access.
assholes.

Very smart move, when gmail starts charging for POP3, will you move again? You always pay, one way or the other, if you honestly believe Google will forever let you use gmail without looking at their ads or paying them something, you're delusional.

It's simple: put your mailboxes on your own domain, and pay for hosting on that domain. You pay, but you have full control over the mailboxes, and you can put a site (or sites) up without extra cost.

Re:there's always a price

[kiwimate]

i just had to switch to gmail today ,as yahoo decided to start charging £12 a year for POP access.

assholes.

Right, imagine the nerve...they decided to start charging a nominal fee for a specific remote method of access to their otherwise entirely free e-mail service.

Fine, decide it's not worth it, either dispense with the service or graciously move to a different service. But why be petty about it and call them names?

And, as you say, there's always a price. Same with gmail. You're the consumer; decide whether the service is worth the price and act as you see fit on that basis.

Re:there's always a price

[Anonymous Coward]

You can use scripts like fetchyahoo and sendymail to emulate POP access to yahoo if you want. I have been using both for about a year with minor problems with attachments and formatting.

Re:there's always a price

[paulpach]

I am not sure google will ever have a need to charge for pop3 access:

A lot of people read their email in multiple locations: at work and at the job. To avoid the confusion of what has been read and what not, the most convenient way is to access the web interface. Other features such as convenient searching your mail, labels and chat are not available via pop3. Also the way they organize emails into conversations is very user friendly and unmatched by most pop3 clients. The ads on gmail are very unobtrusive and do not get in your way at all. For many people (me for one), these features are compelling enough to prefer reading the email online than via pop3.

As long as they keep providing incentives like these for people to actually go and check their email on their web site, they wont have a big problem with showing ads.

Re:there's always a price

[Nezer]

I setup YuSucker to yank my email from Yahoo! just a few weeks ago. I send it through tor and avoid the dreaded Error 99. Now I get my email delivered through my server, polled ever 5 minutes, with the added benefit of both the already excellent (IHMO) Yahoo! spam filter as well as a locally-configured spamassassin.

And for those naysayers that claim Yahoo's spam filter sucks... well, guess what? They all suck. Still, I've had my yahoo address as my primary email account for several years and their filter gets 99%+ of the junk. I get around 3000-5000 spams a week in my junk folder (really). It rarely has a false positive (when it does it's usually an automated message from a machine, totally understandable, IMO). What few yahoo misses (maybe 3-5 a day), spamassassin usually gets.

I'm annoyed that Yahoo! doesn't offer free POP/IMAP access. I understand the reason but it's still annoying. I have a few domains and used to use them for email but found the spam became unmanageable. When YoSucker stops working (and it will as soon as the Yahoo Mail Beta is forced down our throats), I'll either pony-up the $20/year or move to gmail.

Re:there's always a price

[N7DR]

if you honestly believe Google will forever let you use gmail without looking at their ads or paying them something, you're delusional.

Not necessarily. Google doesn't need to make money from every user of their gmail service. They're smart people, so I'm sure they have already calculated some threshold for the percentage of people who use POP3 access to gmail, above which they will start to charge. As long as the number of people using POP3 is small (for some value of "small"), I don't think it necessarily follows that they will automatically one day start to charge for POP3 access.

Re:there's always a price

[xappax]

Then you'll be wanting to check out YPOPs!, which provides a POP3 interface for Yahoo webmail.

Re:there's always a price

[geobeck]

...if you honestly believe Google will forever let you use gmail without looking at their ads...

Um... Gmail does "make you look at their ads". They're over to the right. Subtle, text-only, context-focused ads. And with the context focus, I've actually followed a couple of them when they were relevant to the conversation.

Re:there's always a price

[Anonymous Coward]

Um... Gmail does "make you look at their ads". They're over to the right.

We're talking about POP3 access to the mail ... try to keep up, mkay?

Re:there's always a price

[Kid Zero]

[i]with the added benefit of both the already excellent (IHMO) Yahoo! spam filter as well as a locally-configured spamassassin.[/i]

You'd need the second, as the first ("excellent" Yahoo Spam Filter) is an oxymoron.

Re:there's always a price

[kosmosik]

Side note: actually you can use GMail with your own domain. You just point your DNS server to serve MX records pointing to Google servers and use Google Apps For Your Domain for free with usual GMail account (web, pop, smtp access). I am using it right now with my private domain and I am perfectly happy with it. The servers are fast. Never I've occured any downtime. No ads (I use POP mainly). Spam filters are excellent. Also it is nice that when I decide to use GMail via webmail all my sent mail is also there! GMail (for your domain) rules here.

So maybe just get a domain, use Google to serve mail for that domain and then *if* Google decides to charge you for POP access *then* get mail hosting somwhere else. At least you will keep your domain and addresses.

Re:there's always a price

[feepness]

i just had to switch to gmail today ,as yahoo decided to start charging £12 a year for POP access.

assholes.

I know, how do they expect you to pay when you go to your job for free?

What do you mean you don't work for free?

asshole!

Re:there's always a price

[Hadlock]

I'm willing to bet less than 1% of gmail users use POP3 exclusively. For those 1% they're still getting emailed links from their girlfriend's little sister that say "wow! check out this awesome youtube video!" or "click here to read your latest reply at XYZforum.com!", giving google fantastic spidering data and helps keep their engine up to date. news.google.com probably taps in to that vast database of knowledge to scrape for new headlines and helping sort the good from the bad.... it's priceless data, and a good justification for giving out free email.

Re:there's always a price

[Ginger Unicorn]

i do work for free actually. asshole!

Re:there's always a price

[Ginger Unicorn]

yet yahoo seem perfectly happy to forward all my mail to gmail for free, where i wont be reading the yahoo ads either.

"Fine, decide it's not worth it, either dispense with the service or graciously move to a different service."

that's what i did.

"But why be petty about it and call them names?" becuase i feel like it, what are you my mother?

Re:there's always a price

[gfreeman]

The OP might have Tourette's Syndrome, you insensitive clod!

hmm

[Knara]

I wonder if this will fall under the "in our contract it doesn't legally say 'unlimited' " bit. I still get annoyed when I think back to the days of dialup when an ISP I used that advertised unlimited connection times sent me a nasty email because I stayed online for days at a time without disconnecting, saying that "unlimited doesn't mean unmetered"... as if that mattered to me... metering only is an issue when I pay for something according to the meter reading.

Anyway, I don't really see this as a huge boon. I don't even use 1% of either my gmail or my yahoo account. Are there really people who NEED 10gig+ mail storage?

Re:hmm

[zcsteele]

I don't even use 1% of either my gmail or my yahoo account. When I first got my gmail account, I used it the way I did all my prior accounts - file the worthwhile stuff away, delete the extraneous stuff. Used space hovered around 1-2%.

I quit deleting emails about a year ago. Now I'm up to almost 6% of my storage limit.

yahoo e-mail addresses, the new DMZ?

[Coraon]

ok, so how about this one? 1) Pirate a piece of data 2) Upload to yahoo mail account 3) Share the user id and pass with people you want to share. 4) ... 5) profit?

Re:yahoo e-mail addresses, the new DMZ?

[TheRealMindChild]

If Bugmenot taught me one thing, is there is always the asshole who changes the password as soon as they log in.

Re:yahoo e-mail addresses, the new DMZ?

[Anonymous Coward]

that'll teach you to share kiddy porn ya douchebag

Re:yahoo e-mail addresses, the new DMZ?

[mtmra70]

Breaking News:

Yahoo! offers unlimited email storage*

*Attachments may not be larger than 500KB

Re:yahoo e-mail addresses, the new DMZ?

[chrisb33]

Exactly - that's my real question. What's the maximum attachment size? If it's small enough, this whole discussion is moot.

Re:yahoo e-mail addresses, the new DMZ?

[Anonymous Coward]

you can always reset password by answering secret questions and stuff.

Re:yahoo e-mail addresses, the new DMZ?

[donatzsky]

Unless they also limit the size of the actual message, you can just Base64 encode the file.

Re:yahoo e-mail addresses, the new DMZ?

[swimin]

Or break a file into many attachments.

Re:yahoo e-mail addresses, the new DMZ?

[fatalfury]

That's been going on for ages. http://www.peer2mail.com/ Although consistent support and involvement is spotty at best.

YahoomailFS?

[kroepoek]

So can we mount a yahoo account from initrd and never have to buy another HDD again?

Re:YahoomailFS?

[nuzak]

As long as you don't mind advertisements being stuck to the bottom of every file. I can fix just about everything that yahoo mail does with adblock, greasemonkey, or other cleverness (and I only even block the really obtrusive stuff) but I can't keep them from sticking their sig on the bottom of every mail I send. That's why I don't use yahoo mail for anything but registrations.

Re:YahoomailFS?

[AusIV]

That was my first thought.

Re:YahoomailFS?

[morgan_greywolf]

Probably not, but I'll bet someone could write a GnomeVFS plugin.

Re:YahoomailFS?

[Virgil Tibbs]

theres already gmailfs, it will not be long until theres a yahoo fs.

in fact i thought i read about a file sharing network using google a few months back...

Dennis Miller line:

[mellonhead]

(re: Men's Wearhouse "2-fer sale") "Hey folks, two of SHIT is SHIT. If they really wanted to fuck you, they'd give you three of these things."

Re:Dennis Miller line:

[mrobin604]

Ahhh yes, I remember when Dennis Miller was actually funny... those were the days...

Re:Dennis Miller line:

[mellonhead]

Thank you so very much for sharing that.

Spammers

[BrianPan]

I'll write the followup headline...

Yahoo to Offer Unlimited Email Storage, Spammers Rejoice

What, did they really think the users would be filling the extra space?

message size?

[firpecmox]

I use gmail and its on its way to 3gb. Ive used about 15 percent of that and thats plenty for me. I know theres alot of people who would probably use all of that but instead of offering unlimited space, how about they increase the size of the message you can send. it would be nice to be able to send more than about 10mb per message. Im not sure how much yahoo lets you send but my friend who uses it sometimes has trouble sending me files around 5mb.

Ya who?

[bobetov]

This news thrills me. I cannot contain my joy. Tears of sincerity drop, one by one, onto my overflowing keyboard.

When I think about important, relevant web sites, Yahoo is not on the tip of my brain pan.

ITYF

[Colin Smith]

You've done exactly what they wanted you to.

Re:ITYF

[Ginger Unicorn]

well, i'm sure they'd rather i give them £12, but in any case i moved to avoid the fee, rather than just to spite yahoo.

Woohoo.dumb

[Junior J. Junior III]

Nothing like childish, wild-eyed stupidity to spark another .com bubble. It was brainlessly exhuberant promises with no tangible means to deliver that caused the crash in 2000, and apparently Yahoo has learned nothing.

Well, maybe they have -- they survived the first crash, and swallowed a whole bunch of smaller companies in the process. Companies that had smart, innovative ideas but not enough capital to sustain themselves through a bleak period. Could it be that this is what Yahoo! is hoping will happen again?

Fantastic!

[CranberryKing]

Now I can procrastinate phasing off yahoo!mail even longer.

Storage doesn't matter anymore. Three features gmail has that kills yahoo!mail
1. Still force mandatory spam tags on outgoing mail.
2. Still have cap on attachment size (I want to send huge numanuma song video as attachment to the world).
3. Interface still sucks (even the beta).

Unlimited Storage...

[Psx29]

unless you're in China, where it's unlimited until you say something bad about the government...

Re:Unlimited Storage...

[Anonymous Coward]

unless you're in China, where it's unlimited until you say something bad about the government...

You misspelled USA.

How interesting

[Kusand]

He takes a little poke at Yahoo, saying "I end this blog post with a mention of a fact I've brought up before: Yahoo Mail's slick new interface has been in beta forever...by which I mean since September of 2005. And it remains so." Interesting. I guess he forgot Gmail is still beta. Or maybe he didn't read the Gmail logo!

Re:How interesting

[geekoid]

or maybe the story isn't about gmail, so gring them up would be no reason.

Just cause he 'poked' at Yahoo, doesn't mean he supports gmail.

Pray tell me what use will unlimited storage be ?

[unity100]

Just whats the point of it ?

Usability Up, But it is slooooooow

[geoffrobinson]

I like the interface over the old one. But I find it to be much, much slower. My guess would be that there are numerous connections going on in the background.

Re:Usability Up, But it is slooooooow

[jimjamjoh]

It's dreadfully slow to load up, yes, because it's got so much javascript overhead on the front end. But that's a feature, not a flaw, because it's designed to just sit in a browser window/tab and never refresh the page, and once the initial loading is complete, it is MUCH faster to do repetitive email tasks, because the full page never reloads, just little pieces here and there via AJAX.

So, just like a desktop app, you sacrifice a bit in start-up time to get an app that is more responsive and allows more seamless transition between its various features.

I'll stick with Gmail thank you

[Nonillion]

Sorry, but I think my current Gmail's 2833 MB of storage ought to be enough for anyone.

Re:I'll stick with Gmail thank you

[zornorph]

I ran out of space on my gmail account last week (I use it to receive several high traffic mailing lists). It was a bit of a pain to delete emails to make more space, as it puked the first few times I tried to delete several thousand at a time. Just because something is too big for you doesn't mean it's too big for others. If this was true, we should go back to using 640k, right?

Too bad it's Yahoo...

[CoolCalmChris]

...but, here's a thought- 1) Gmail gives you 100 invites. 2) Each account has, um...whatever amount of storage (3 GB?). 3) That's 300 GB...see where this is going? The (considerable) hassle is everything you want to store has to be in 3 GB chunks. Oh, and you have to make another account with a catalog of where it all is...never mind. The Yahoo/initrd script- I like that.

Re:Too bad it's Yahoo...

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Gmail gives you 100 invites.
You no longer need to use the invites. You can sign up for Gmail now without being invited to join. Account storage is currently around 2833 MB (at time of this posting).

no proof reading required?

[Zwaxy]

From TFA:

"Google introduced a weird, weirdly compelling system that lets you watch your Gmail allowance grow moment by moment. (At the moment, I have 2833.40496GB--waitaminnit, now it's 2833.40454GB.)"

Firstly, he's about 3 orders of magnitude out here. Gmail currently offers 2.8GB, not 2833GB.

And secondly, growing is where things get bigger, and in this example they're getting smaller.

Wouldn't you expect a journalist who writes about technical stuff to have at least basic numeracy skills?

Re:no proof reading required?

[dasnipa]

not to mention that 2833.40496GB is greater than 2833.40454GB so according the article, gmail's space decreases over time... good job proof reading...

Re:no proof reading required?

[p3d0]

That, and the number is DECREASING!!

It's not the storage space really...

[angelwalkwithme]

I used Yahoo's Email service back when it was Rocketmail. I did this faithfully and I loved the service, but one day they decided to start charging for their pop3 service, something that practically cost them nothing. The next day I signed up for a google e-mail account with free pop3 and a ton of space and I've never looked back. The point is, unlimited e-mail is a novell concept, but you get more than you'll need with Gmail, and you don't have to pay to integrate your e-mail with Evolution, Thunderbird or Outlook. But I keep in mind that it's always cool to have competition to give the consumers the best deals.

Re:It's not the storage space really...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not that pop3 *costs* them money, it's because it costs them revenue. POP3 was designed to move email around, not adverts. If you access your email via pop or imap, you're not getting ads and they're not getting impressions and possible click through revenue. The reason gmail, yahoo email, aol, hotmail and all those services exist is not because of coporate generousity, but "... 3)Profit!". If most of the users started accessing their email via pop, their whole ad based revenue system would fall appart. The cost discourages most from doing so (aside from that fact that most people can't distinguish 'tween POP3 and soda). The cost also replaces lost revenue.

I guess they could subvert your email and start inserting text ads and/or images to each of your incomming email the same way that AOL and others add little self promoting signatures to the bottom of each email you send ("This was sent by my rasberry!" Gee, I really needed to know that). But that would be low...very, very low. Anyone taking bets on how long until we see something like that?

Re:It's not the storage space really...

[Anonymous Coward]

And we all know where Novell concepts get you! Sucking from the MS teat!

Unlimited suck.

[Anonymous Coward]

Pure awesome. Yeah! Now Yahoo rules!
Unlimited, man!
Unlimited!

./clicks back to gmail.

Y!MFS?

[ebh]

I can just imagine someone doing this for a senior CS project: Implement a Yahoo! Mail file system. Cache the bejeezus out of it, and do block reads and writes as email sending and reading.

GMail says...

[Anonymous Coward]

You are currently using 103 MB (3%) of your 2833 MB.
That's not very limiting in my view, and I see no reason why I should prefer Yahoo!'s.. unlimitedness...

Re:GMail says...

[Anonymous Coward]

You are currently using 1375 MB (48%) of your 2833 MB.

(LKML)

YahooFS may replace SlashdoFS

[goombah99]

The problem with GoogleFS was that it was a lot of work for relatively little, slow storage. Thus it's main utility -- offsite backups--was of little value. Now with unlimited E-mail storage the value of it for offsite backups is realizable. So would someone please create YahooFS so that I can mount my yahooMail-based file system on my desktop and drag my files across?

Up until now I have been using my own hand rolled SlashdotFS. It works by encoding data into comments. It uses a Markov chain sentence generator to encode data in english looking sentences then writes them as comments in slashdot. I use a redudancy system to prevent data loss if comments are deleted. The other problem is that because the system is write-only, it's means lots of bandwidth for files I change frequently. Even so it works. But the results has been that I feel kinda guilty about all the gibberish comments I insert into slashdot. The good news is that because of the english markov sentence generator, no one can actually tell that it's data so they just think it's some person they need to begin flaming immediately.

In the last version of the program I actually made the post somwhat on-topic by retraining the markov genewrator based on the word field distribution of the thread itself. Slightly slower, but then it looks like a conversation.

I'd feel a lot less guilty if I could use YahooFS instead.

Re:YahooFS may replace SlashdoFS

[goombah99]

By the way, the above post was just an encoded version of my secret egg salad recipe.

Re:YahooFS may replace SlashdoFS

[cmacb]

But will it run on Linux?

Re:YahooFS may replace SlashdoFS

[Sporkinum]

Saracen pig! Spartan dog! Take this! And this! Roman cow! Russian snake! Spanish fly!

+1 for a What's up Tiger Lily reference!

Re:YahooFS may replace SlashdoFS

[kurzweilfreak]

Congrats on your generator passing the Turing test. :)

Re:YahooFS may replace SlashdoFS

[FuryG3]

This explains SOOOOO much about /. comments! Clearly almost everyone here is using this implementation.

Re:YahooFS may replace SlashdoFS

[jzeejunk]

I use a redudancy(sic) system to prevent data loss if comments are deleted.

with all the dupes i'm sure redundancy is not that much of a concern.

Re:YahooFS may replace SlashdoFS

[rez_rat]

The funny thing is... most those comments were modded "Insightful"!!!

S-

Re:YahooFS may replace SlashdoFS

[ockegheim]

My bad, that was my /.ModerationFS implementation.

Re:YahooFS may replace SlashdoFS

[isorox]

The other problem is that because the system is write-only

I have a similar backup location -- /dev/null, it's blazingly fast, it's as if my hard drive's read speed is the weak link.

Surely you mean WORM?

Re:YahooFS may replace SlashdoFS

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, "All your data are belong to us" is the catch. I remember a few years back, I think it was Hotmail or thier messenger, in the terms of service it said anything you transmit through their service was fair game, trade secrets etc..

Thank you Yahoo!

[extern_void]

"Yahoo, thank you!
Finally it read my thousand e-mails asking for an extra e-mail storage!
Yahoo rules!"
-Hammer, The Spammer

Let's test unlimited...

[dghcasp]

while [ 1 ]; do
od -h /dev/mem | mail someuser@yahoo.com
done

Re:Let's test unlimited...

[ThisNukes4u]

why not use /dev/urandom instead of /dev/mem, which could be a potential security risk... just sayin, ya know?

Re:Let's test unlimited...

[nacturation]

why not use /dev/urandom instead of /dev/mem, which could be a potential security risk... just sayin, ya know? Good idea as it's really important to back up your pseudo random number generators.

Unlimited?

[Jaqenn]

What If someone writes a program to throw entropy bits at their storage from now to forever? Will Yahoo save each and every one? Also, could such a scheme be sustainable by artificially limiting their external connections? In other words, could they say something like "Worst case scenario is that we receive X GB of data per day. We can add storage at a rate to accommodate that, so it's a go!" In other words, perhaps that entropy bits program can't get data through to them fast enough to out pace the growth rate of their data-farm.

Maximum file size...?

[loimprevisto]

I don't come anywhere close to filling up my current yahoo mailbox because of the annoyingly low maximum size of file attachments. If I could easily use this unlimited storage to send file attachments of a useful size, then this might actually be a helpful thing for me.
Perhaps its because of a limited exposure to web email sites, but I seem to be one of the few people who likes Yahoo!'s interface... the only other web mail address I have is at http://www.abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklm nopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijk.com/ and that's not practical for ever day use.

Hmm... reading all the comments here has me interested in trying something new. Would someone please send me a gmail invite to loimprevisto at yahoo.com?

Re:Maximum file size...?

[Walter Carver]

You don't need anymore an invitation for Gmail. Go to www.gmail.com and click on "sign up for Gmail".

Re:Maximum file size...?

[KingKiki217]

Sure. It's on its way.

What they are acknowledging

[mapkinase]

...is the simple fact that current data access speeds are so slumber that for all practical abuses of yahoo mail, you won't get benefit from it.

"Unlimited" means they have enough disk space for all the e-mails all average Joes and Janes will be able to send in 4-5 years. For the guys thinking "bittorrent drive" and similar "innovations" - Comcast will make it unusable.

Top Five Ways To Beat "Unlimited" Storage

[The_REAL_DZA]

5. " New and Improved Unlimited Storage"
4. " Unlimited Storage ( With Free Pie! )"
3. " Unlimited Storage Plus "
2. " Unlimited Storage Plus Plus "

And the number 1 way to beat "Unlimited" storage:

1. " DOUBLE Unlimited Storage!"

Re:Obligatory Bill Gates quote

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you need to read this

FUSE and Yahoo?

[FuryG3]

So, FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace), which can be run on a number of platforms, allows you to mount your Gmail account like a drive. If you copy data to this disk, it uploads it to your Gmail account as a message/attachment. So now you have a ~3GB hosted virtual drive, albeit with pretty slow access speeds... Pretty wild stuff.

Unlimited messagees on Yahoo makes me hope someone is working on a libYmail component, allowing FUSE to do the same with Yahoo Mail. Got a 15 gigs of TV shows/movies/porn which you've been thinking about deleting anyway? Let Yahoo have them!

From this other article:

Users are subject to Yahoo's abuse policies, which requires users to follow "normal email practices" and not engage in activities like using Yahoo mail for basic online storage (a number of services have popped up to help people use Gmail for this purpose). Abusive accounts will not be summarily deleted - users will be notified by Yahoo and/or accounts suspended, but users will still have access to the data.

If you get caught, Yahoo seems to allow you to pull the data back down. If they won't (I'm going to guess they're going to change that policy pretty quick), then oh well, you were going to delete that stuff anyway! :)

Re:FUSE and Yahoo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a couple Google accounts and a couple Yahoo accounts and set up a nice RAID 1+0 array.

Self hosting

[bwilliams80]

I would consider the average ./'r above the curve with technology. who here doesnt own there own domain name with their own email services?

Re:Self hosting

[digital bath]

I have several domains, and I use Google "apps for your domain" to get gmail. I highly recommend it.

Re:Self hosting

[zsau]

I have a few domains of my ownsome, but I don't host them on my own. It isn't worth the trouble of making sure I always have a computer on and that it's always accessible from the outside world. I pay for a decent IMAP+webmail service instead (there's plenty of ways I could've got IMAP for free on my domain, but none were as good as what I get by paying for it).

I might host my own webpage, which is relatively unimportant (in fact, the real version's been down for a few weeks now...), but I wouldn't host my own email.

Re:crash and burn

[Zwaxy]

They don't owe you anything. I'm sure their terms and conditions allow them to close your account without notice if they want to. Good luck suing them!

And even if you do get 100,000 emails a day, and they're 10KB each, that's still only 1GB per day. How much does disk space cost when you buy in bulk? A lot less than $1 per GB, anyway. So all your effort of signing up for thousands of spam lists would effectively end up costing Yahoo $1 per day? I think they could probably afford that.

What does unlimited really mean?

[suggsjc]

I haven't read the article or Yahoo!'s terms of agreements, but what does unlimited *really* mean? Not that I would want to, but just say I automated a script that went around the net and automatically send email with pseudo random pics/video's/other large media as attachments. Or I sent nightly backups of my entire filesystem (I know bandwidth becomes a limiting factor, but still).

How much "stuff" do I have to start throwing in my inbox before they raise a red flag and either ban the account or throttle my upload speed? Unlimited is a tricky word. It can actually mean different things (kinda). For instance I can say I allow unlimited refills at a restaurant, but it really means unlimited for that day. When they close and reopen the next day you'll have to buy another cup to get your "unlimited" refills.

All that to say, I'm sure that somewhere there are probably clauses that will greatly restrict their definition of "unlimited." Does anyone know what/where they are?

Re:What does unlimited really mean?

[br0d]

I don't know what they mean by unlimited, but my antisocial personality disorder urges me to try and help them find out.

Re:What does unlimited really mean?

[that this is not und]

Years ago, when the Engineering department decided to network together all our PC's, they charged one particular putz of a tech to be in charge of it. He was all high-on-the-hog about being the one with the Windows NT 3.1(!) Server password and being in charge.

I emailed my C: drive to a co-worker. This was in the era of Windows for Workgroups and 10BaseT, but it was still quite an adventure.

I didn't get in trouble over it, either. IT was in no way involved on that network. They were busy draping cables through the cubicles to connect dumb terminals to their Xenix 'minicomputer.'

Re:What does unlimited really mean?

[Provocateur]

For now the fine print says 'Prices and participation may vary. Must be 18 or older.' They will add more details later as more people test this thing out with more and more boneheaded ideas.
 

Does it come with unlimited "skyscraper" ads?

[melted]

Does it come with unlimited "skyscraper" ads? That's the question. Seriously, why would anyone use anything but GMail anymore?

Re:Does it come with unlimited "skyscraper" ads?

[apathy maybe]

Heard of a thing called adblock? The only place I see Yahoo ads any more is on somebodies else's machine.

And to add to all the comments about experiences with Yahoo mail. I've had two addresses since 1998-9. They both currently get shit loads of spam, but guess what! It is all filtered. The only false positives were from a couple of sites, since I hit not-spam, that hasn't happened since.

The interface just works (maybe it is just because I'm used to it?).

It isn't Hotmail (I know people still using Hotmail from around the time I got my email accounts, it still sucks).

I'm a happy user of Yahoo Mail, and have been for a number of years.

you can still have free POP3/SMTP acess to Yahoo!

[Anonymous Coward]

Free POP3/SMTP access to Yahoo! mail. http://sourceforge.net/projects/yahoopops/ provides a POP3/SMTP server interface at one end to talk to email clients and an HTTP client (browser) interface at the other which allows it to talk to Yahoo! ... plus lots of firefox plugins can act as http/pop/smtp tunnels to yahoo, gmail, hotmail and others.

SLOW AND UNRELIABLE UNLIMITED EMAIL?

[MilesNaismith]

Half the time lately Yahoo seems very slow. Then sometimes I go click on a message and it tells me it can't show me the content just now, try later.

Fat lot of good unlimited storage is if it's slow and unreliable.

Is it just me....

[billdar]

Is it just me or does this appear to be a challenge?

Disposable Emails

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything else aside, one thing Gmail doesn't have that Yahoo does - disposable emails.

Re:Disposable Emails

[Ferzerp]

incorrect.

besides, even when it was invite only, you had 100 invites... each account you made had 100 more....

Awesome!

[Jeremi]

Finally I'll be able to realize my dream of emailing myself the exact value of Pi!

Truly no limit

[booyabazooka]

The key is... they've finally replaced all their old tubes with a big dump truck.

But...but

[Anonymous Coward]

Mac had it first. This is a blatant attempt to just copy a feature that makes macs so much better than PCs. I bet it looks ugly because I am so self absorbed with macs. There is no world outside of macs. I also blindly agree with all liberal agendas and help launch Mocha Latte Awareness Month to remember all the turtle neck well-to-dos who act like they work but live off daddy's money.

Spam spam spam spam etc

[BigBadBus]

Gmail has at least one good thing in its favor: its spam filter. Since I started using Gmail two months ago, nearly 100% of spam was filtered, with only one or two (minor) flase negatives. Compare that to Yahoo's SpamGuard. Yuk! Plus Gmail has a host of other great features, thre best one of which is free pop3 access. I've introduced a longtime user of Yahoo to Gmail and she hasn't looked back either.

Rediffmail beat them to the punch

[Russ Nelson]

Gee, I'm surprised that Rediffmail's
announcement of unlimited email storage didn't make Slashdot.

Yahoo is doing this with everything

[walterbyrd]

Yahoo message boards - once pretty good - are now beyond FUBAR. Yahoo photos, and maps, also suck now.

Re:crash and burn

[Anonymous Coward]

So all your effort of signing up for thousands of spam lists ...

WTF? You "sign up" for spam lists? Gee. I dont know what to say.

RUBBER TIRES NEVER BREAK

Lawsuits comming

[DrLov3]

That lawyer from the Simpons must be like : "This will be best lawsuit case I ever had since the never ending story :)"

Re:Lawsuits comming

[DrLov3]

And I would like to had : "Only two things are infinite : the Yahoo email storage space and human stupidity ... and i'm not sure about the former"

Dennis Miller, cocaine addicted?

[Anonymous Coward]

No kidding, did you see him on the Daily Show last night? What a gasbag. He seems to think that throwing literary and pop references into lowbrow insults magically turn them into jokes. At first people were into it, but then towards the end of the interview you can tell he was just reciting this stuff from a pre-rehearsed script and the audience noticeably turns on him, by the end of it they were laughing more AT him than with him.

The new Yahoo Beta is not scaled for large amounts

[fluor2]

The new Yahoo Beta is not scaled for this unlimited storage.

1. The ajax interface is slow. And Yahoo Mail does not change into pages when viewing, making it really hard to read old mail.
2. Yahoo only accepts like 4 filter rules! Oh my god, it's amazing how you can filter with only 4 rules!
3. Yahoo does not sort on recieved but date, thus spammers sending mail using old dates will end up in the middle of your inbox, making it impossible to find this mail (read 1.).

I have several spams that I have never found, since my inbox is becoming so large (I've had my account for several years). Yahoo Mail is nice, but it's to slow for real use.

Anyone notice his storage space is going down?

[spagetti_code]

Then Google introduced a weird, weirdly compelling system that lets you watch your Gmail allowance grow moment by moment. (At the moment, I have 2833.40496GB--waitaminnit, now it's 2833.40454GB.)

2833.40496 -> 2833.40454

Looks like he must have ticked off someone at google.

Pfft...

[mathcam]

...it's probably only countably infinite, anyway. Just wait until Google counters with their "cardinality of the continuum" email allowances later this year. Then we'll see who's laughing.

two solutions

[Walter Carver]

Solutions:

1. open a Yahoo Mail on another domain (yahoo.ca or yahoo.in)
2. use FreePOPs

Enough...?

[toxique]

Still not enough to store my pr0n

Damn lies!

[Anonymous Coward]

I check my yahoo account once a month or two. I've never had anything close to 100 emails (like like maybe 10). To have 2500 emails in there, you would have to not have checked it in years. I've had this specific account for at least 5 years, and I likely haven't even received 7000 spam mails in total over the time. I'm absolutely positive you're making this up. Anyone with a yahoo account knows you're fucking lying.

BTW, I have a gmail account too (don't use it at all, can't stand the slow-loading interface that didn't even have a delete button), and it gets spam too. Every single time I check it there's spam to delete (but at least I don't go claiming there's thousands -- *I'm* not a liar) Personally I'd rather delete a dozen spams that don't get caught by the spam filter per month than put up with gmail's interface (just give me plain old html, no slow-loading AJAX crap)

Not that I have a use for more space anyways. I delete all the old stuff (mailing lists, offers, etc), so my 100mb box is like 1% full...

Re:Obligatory Bill Gates quote

[windsurfer619]

I don't think that really applies, since email doesn't really (normally, and of course you can make the exception, up to 14 mb) get any larger than a few kilobytes. The "640k" comment was directed at data as a whole, while email is... well, only designed for email.

A better type of unlimited storage.

[u8i9o0]

The BOFH in me would implement 'unlimited storage' by directing all mail to /dev/null.

Of course, the impressive part would be in any sort of retrieval, but that's going to be addressed in the next code revision... :)

Re:Pray tell me what use will unlimited storage be

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm gonna store all the positive numbers!

you create it, then you manage it - screw that

[tacokill]

It's simple: put your mailboxes on your own domain, and pay for hosting on that domain. You pay, but you have full control over the mailboxes, and you can put a site (or sites) up without extra cost.

Are you saying he should install his own e-mail servers on a hosted domain? If he did that, then he has to manage a mail server and form some kind of spam strategy. Have fun with that!

This is exactly why we use Yahoo for our domain. Both web and e-mail. Works great for my company and frees me from the hassel of an additional server. I'm not a fanboy but Yahoo has gotten the job done and is fairly easy to deal with for what we use them for (basic website + 100 email accts or so). I just forward a few DNS records and those services are handled by Yahoo -- but that fact is hidden from users.

Unless you have a "staff" I see no reason to do this yourself when others can do it better. (and keep in mind, I am talking from a business standpoint here where time is money. Of COURSE I run my own mail server at home to hack around on)

dude, its $20 a year

[tacokill]

I actually bought Yahoo Mail after using it for free since '97.

Guess what? For $20, it solved all of the problems you list. Well, except for the interface part but hey, that's subjective. $20 gets me 100MB attachments, last I checked. No tags either on anything outbound. I can also do POP3 if I wanted.

That's why I don't mind paying $20/year for it. In my mind, it lets me do what I should be able to do with email. And yes, I have gmail too.

Seconded

[tacokill]

I like the new interface. It's almost like...Outlook (gasp!)

Re:Pray tell me what use will unlimited storage be

[unity100]

with an infinite storage, you could as well store negative numbers, 0 and positive numbers together.

pfuh! This encryption is broken, nice egg salad!!!

[freaker_TuC]

Splendid encryption system! You use the English language as code..
You must be German .. right ? because there are words in it that sound German!
Your Egg Salad tastes great, I tried it, only the little bit of yahoo can better be changed to a small pinch of Google, it spices the stuff up lots better; My house almost burned down when it started to flame by itself; you got to find a way to loose that side-effect or is it because I used too much Yahoo in it anyways?

Just fascinating! Here is the recipy to proove you, I think if you encrypt it twice people will not find out your recipies that fast anymore, give me credit when this thing gets big mkay?

The recipy:

1. lot of work, little it of backups, little with of realize.
   
2. Some Yahoo unt handrol,
   
3. Slash english look then write them in data loss,
   
4. Lots of bandwidth has all the gibberish I insert into the good new data so it need to begin flaming immediately

The problem with GoogleFS was that it was a lot of work for relatively little , slow storage. Thus it 's main utility -- of fsite backups --was of little value. Now with unlimited E-mail storage the value of it for of fsite backups is realiz abl e . So would some one please create Yahoo FS so that I can mo unt my yahooMail-based file system on my desktop and drag my files across?

Up until now I have been using my own hand rol led Slash dotFS. It works by encoding data into comments. It uses a Markov chain sentence generator to encode data in english look ing sentences then write s them as comments in slashdot. I use a redudancy system to prevent data loss if comments are deleted. The other problem is that because the system is write-only, it's means lots of bandwidth for files I change frequently. Even so it works. But the results has been that I feel kinda guilty about all the gibberish comments I insert into slashdot. The good new s is that because of the english markov sentence generator, no one can actually tell that it's data so they just think it 's some person they need to begin flaming immediately .

In the last version of the program I actually made the post somwhat on-topic by retraining the markov genewrator based on the word field distribution of the thread itself. Slightly slower, but then it looks like a conversation.

I'd feel a lot less guilty if I could use YahooFS instead.
ps: aren't there supposed to be eggs in your salad?

...but there is a folder limit of 65,535 messages

[Anonymous Coward]

There might be unlimited storage capacity, but you can only have 65,535 messages in any given yahoo folder.

I accidentally found this out when my "vacation" auto-response message filter got into a fight with a mail server telling me that the sending account doesn't exist.

Nothing to see here...

[mjeppsen]

*yawn*
Yahoo...Bringing you Yesterday's innovations Next Year.

-MJ

Elitist Trolls FTW!

[paladinwannabe2]

I would like to point out that:
1. Yahoo! email is the largest email provider on the web.
2. Yahoo! email has been around since 1997, Gmail has been open since 2007 (though the Beta started in 2004). This means that people have been using Yahoo! longer than you've been trolling on slashdot.
I'm not going to claim that it's the best email ever, just that it doesn't deserve Gmail fanboys snickering at people who use it. It's worked for me for 7 years now, which is a whole lot longer than I've been trolling on /.

Yahoo Storage

[HockeyPuck]

I work at yahoo and approximately 80% of ALL the email in our system is SPAM and gets tossed into your Bulk Mail folder, and this in itself is only a tiny fraction of the total amount of SPAM we receive (our filters toss out ALOT of SPAM which doesn't make it to your Bulk Mail folder) Let's say there was no limit on the amount of SPAM you could store in your account, this would only add to the shear amount of SPAM that could be kept in our system.

While a great marketing move, technically not a wise one as we're probably the #1 target for spam.

Re:Yahoo Storage

[Anonymous Coward]

Yahoo mail also arbitrarily decides some emails are spam even though they come from a trusted source and places them into the bulk folder. Examples are bank emails about the new statement, event invites etc. No amount of clicking on "Not a spam" button will help to correct this.

Once I got used to labels instead of folders, I canceled Yahoo in favor of Gmail. It's just common sense.

Yahoo is the new AOL.

Quote

[ScrewMaster]

"Would you like to pet my pussy?"

"Sure. Move the cat."

quibble: "anniversary"

[beanyk]

OT, but have people completely forgotten that "te-year anniversary" is as bad as "PIN number" and "ATM machine"? The submitter meant "tenth anniversary".

Yahoo's Spam Filter Was Good...

[JiveBay]

until they made their premium email services cost money several years ago. I think they did it on purpose. They even have some limits on spam blocking and have a better filter for premium email users. Looks like they are letting spam work for them.

http://billing.mail.yahoo.com/bm/Upgrades

Re:Obligatory Bill Gates quote

[Anonymous Coward]

Wooooosssshhhh ...

Define bill

[Roger W Moore]

Unfortunately your argument fails for two reasons.

First because it is not established how "bill" is defined. In English it translates as a demand for money i.e. "Please pay me the sum of $1 to cover the time I spent reading your post". I realize that the American meaning refers to a unit of paper currency, something that in English we would call a "note". However it is not clear which language the original poster is using. If English then I have no doubt whatsoever that he could send out "unlimited" bills for $1.

Secondly "unlimited" clearly cannot exceed the entire population of the planet so it is bounded to ~$6 billion.

From this we can conlcude that the original poster is either an American named Bill or comes from outside the US.

Re:Define bill

[0123456789]

You are assuming that no-one can make more than one intelligent comment?

Stop kitty porn!

[Lethyos]

End feline exploitation!

Just use Adblock and the old yahoo mail interface

[cshay]

That's what I do anyway.

They have the old "Dial up" ymaps (old interface)

[cshay]

That's what I use, anyway.

Write-only backups?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's clever.

So, data recovery is in the next version then?

If you want write-only backups, I already offer very affordable write-only data retention devices at very reasonable rates.

This Wont Work

[Velocir]

I don't think this will work. We used to have unlimited texting over here in NZ, but people were sending a 100,000 txts a month so they had to cancel the service. People have been uploading hours of video to try to fill their Gmail accounts.
People will always try to push the limits of what is possible when corporations offer them things that are supposedly unlimited...

Simple maths

[Anonymous Coward]

So, if I start backing up my 50+ GB of data now over my 3Mbps/300kbps connection ... I'll be done sometime in the late winter of 2008. Is that about right?

Finally!

[Soiden]

I will be able to backup everything without using DVDs every month.

Mail Space Unlimied

[sanspeak]

So finally the user is free and the delete button is obsolete. But, I think Rediff.com was the first mail provider to launch the 'Unlimited Mail'.

Do you remember Shi Tao?

[fugaz]

In case you don't...
http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=14884&v ar_recherche=yahoo+china

OFF TOPIC !!!

[denisbergeron]

WoW !
Yahoo give us unlimited storage.
I said the storage worth nothing when you can't access it !
And that's Off topic !
WoW !

Let the market decide.

[jotaeleemeese]

If you have got anecdotal evidence, I have got mine.

Since around they introduced their new version of the email application, I began to receive equal amounts of spam and legitimate messages in my Inbox.

And we are not talking rocket science here, how difficult it is to infer that tons of messages with the subject "From the desk of " are spam? YOu would think that the only spammer left in the world is called Ibrahim Kabila or something like that.

I am in the process of migrating to Google mail where I receive no spam whatsoever.

They did something that broke the filtering for me, and although they always reply to your complaints one can rearely engage in any meaningful technical conversation. Truly frustrating (my Inbox is also broken, in spite of explaining with lots of detail what the problem is they basically told me that I am a nimwit newbie that does not know what he is doing. Nice way to treat somebody that has been with them from very early in the game).

The media as majority opinion.

[jotaeleemeese]

As long as we don't have a scientific poll, we can't say whose opinion is a mojority, mm..okay?

Articles in magazines are written by regular people like anybody else, that doe snot mean they represent a majority.

Try something as easy as display unread messages only (essential when sorting email).

If you have got thousend of emails in a given Inbox the interfaces beamoes a horrible mistake. It has not ben thought through, I wonder if the developpers are Yahoo email users themselves.....

They could bounce them back.

[jotaeleemeese]

There is no legitimate reason to send messages completely out of date, so they should be disposed off in an intelligent way.

Why should they charge?

[jotaeleemeese]

They are getting money from the unobtrusive advertisements that show up while checking email.

Yahoo is trying to charge for an email box as much as Web host providers charge for one year of a full package of services (which normally include a free email account).

They are overcharging and that is the point, not the fact that they are trying to make a buck, which is very legitimate, as long as is not a fast one.