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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.
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.
http://pinopsida.com
Unlimited $1 bills, or unlimited pennies, or unlimited $20 bills, or unlimited flecks of gold ... does it really matter if indeed it is unlimited?
Whenever something says 'unlimited', don't you just want to know, "What really is the limit?"
If Bugmenot taught me one thing, is there is always the asshole who changes the password as soon as they log in.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
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?
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).
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.
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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?
When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins and then run around the mall looking frantic.
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.