Outside the Beltway

YahooMail Improvements

· Tuesday, June 15, 2004 · 6 comments

Yahoo! has gotten aboard the mega-free e-mail bandwagon, increasing the account sizes from a mere 4 megabytes of storage to 100 megabytes and allowing messages of up to 10 megabytes. They’ve been talking about it for awhile but it finally took effect this morning.

PC Pro — Google spurs Yahoo! email refresh

Yahoo! says it will boost storage for its email services in a bid to take some of the steam out of Google’s free 1GB Gmail service.

The Yahoo! free mail service jumps from 3MB message and 4MB storage limits to 10MB and 100MB respectively.

It has also streamlined its premium paid-for email, which previously ranged from $29.99 to $59.99 a year for 25MB and 100MB respectively to a single service priced at $19.99 with a massive 2GB of storage.

The company will also weed out banner and other graphical ads from the service, a feature that Yahoo! will no doubt play on in espousing the benefits of its service over Gmail, which runs targeted ads within messages.

Actually, Yahoo! is way in front of Google on this one, since Google’s service is a beta that’s available only to a select few customers, whereas Yahoo’s is available to its entire existing customer base and to those who sign up for new accounts instantly. Indeed, there is a bidding war going on to get a G-mail account; one wonders if that will stop now.

FILED UNDER: Science & Technology,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Comments

  1. Eric Akawie says:
    Tuesday, 15 June 2004 at 09:13

    Oddly, last night I got an e-mail from Yahoo saying:

    You are currently exceeding your Yahoo! Mail storage quota by a very large amount. You are only allowed -2048.0MB of storage but you are currently using 1.2MB of storage. Your account has been temporarily disabled from receiving new messages.

    Obviously a momentary glitch when they switched to 2GB. I don’t think I lost any mail.

  2. Bill K says:
    Tuesday, 15 June 2004 at 09:34

    I got that same email (except my actual usuage number was higher). When I logged in this morning though I had 2GB of space for free, so, hey, i’ll take it.

  3. Sean Hackbarth says:
    Tuesday, 15 June 2004 at 16:07

    Since Yahoo has to do something serious about spam (I’d take graphical or text ads over spam anytime) and someone was nice enough to give me a gmail account the announcement is no use to me.

  4. Steve Sandler says:
    Sunday, 20 June 2004 at 00:36

    It’s Saturday, June 19th, and neither I nor my friend have been able to bring up our e-mail accounts all day. What’s going on?

    Steve

  5. Maggie Tiojakin says:
    Sunday, 20 June 2004 at 23:24

    How long is this going to last? I haven’t been able to access my Yahoo! account since June 18. Are they posting anything in regards to this on the web link?

  6. fred taylor says:
    Monday, 21 June 2004 at 15:34

    I haven’t been able to access my Yahoo mail since June 19 th! What’s going on ?

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