Yahoo to offer unlimited Email Storage

It seems that the big three, that is Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, always have to compete against each other. When someone introduces a new feature the others are surely going to announce a similar feature that is just a tad better than the feature of the other company. We are witnessing the race for Email storage at the moment. Microsoft has a storage limit of 2 Gigabytes for their users while Google has currently a limit of 2,8 Gigabytes. Yahoo decided to accept the challenge and give the others something to choke on, they announced today that they will offer unlimited Email storage to all of its users in the near future.

As someone who has seen to many unlimited deals in the past I’m a little bit cautious about their plans. Let us take a little example here. Yahoo has currently around 250 million users that use their mail service. Worst case for Yahoo would be if nearly all of their users decided to use Yahoo Mail to send and store large files such as holiday videos, presentations and high res pictures. Let us assume 1 Gigabyte per month per user which would mean that Yahoo would need 250000 Terrabytes of storage space to keep up with the demands of their users. It is however pretty unrealistic that all users will upload 1 Gigabyte per month.

There are surely many dead accounts and some use it for normal mails only. It remains to be seen how many users will really use it for large attachments and how Yahoo will react if a user decided to draw the unlimited option and send a lot of large files in a short time. Google for instance bans users temporary who upload more than 1 gigabyte to Gmail in a short time. John Cramer, Yahoo Vice-President of mail, put it that way: “We are comfortable that our users are far under 1 gigabyte, on average”

Two countries are excluded from the deal: China and Japan. The new service is supposed to go live this June.