this may be a well-timed prelude to GM opening up as unlimited, since Apr 01 is right around the corner. I really like the Yahoo Mail beta, I just wish it didnt take so long to start up. I will celebrate and have two cookies.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v247/brinkeguthrie/P1010002.jpg

http://yodel.yahoo.com/2007/03/27/yahoo-mail-goes-to-infinity-and-beyond/

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070328/tc_nm/yahoo_mail_dc_1

There's not much else to say than, "Damn!" That's definitely some big news but even using only Gmail intensively for about the last 2 years I can only manage to take up about 340MB of the 2833MB and counting.

ahh! why did yahoo get this out before google?

Google now needs to make unlimited storage space on gmail AND picasaweb and google page creator

With IE it only takes me 2 seconds to see the Home section of Yahoo! Mail beta and with FF it takes me about 3 seconds.

I have to wait about 4 seconds to see my Gmail inbox. Weird, huh. I don't think Gmail is faster than Yahoo! Mail. Yahoo! Mail is getting faster and faster.

Anyway, I think all the email services providers will give us unlimited storage in the near future.

From a dead start-
Click on Gmail systray icon, I get the inbox in 4 seconds.

Click on Yahoo icon on toolbar; it takes 13 seconds.

Behavior same on FF2 and IE6.

Well, like the guy in the blog says: they're setting a precedent. Good for them.

I think the speed is the most important. And, we have the quota for operation the informations. Time limited, We can not see anything, catch anything.
For my experience, 30M usage for email can save the time, and, big enough for recieve images. Only the speed is very very important.
The yahoo and Gmail both have the speed problem in china.

yahoo for takes a lot of time...
but I dont even use that account, its just for my domains account.

The storage allotment is meaningless without an upgrade of the attachment size which is now 10 MB for gmail and yahoo.

It's not really meaningless.. even with my 2833 MB (and counting) quota on gmail I've had to switch email accounts once because it filled up (and I didn't want to delete things). Now I'm back up to 77% used for an account I've had for less than a year.

I don't think this is such a big news. unlimited storage is certainly good but Hey!? Hello? The storage thing is over now! user actually want features!

its nor the storage that will count eventually.. it will things like user support that will be critical.

If they ignore the users, every company will lose their users..!!

3GB is definitely enough to not throw anything away. And Google just keeps adding space all the time: I don't know what Yahoo is talking about here. Infinite storage just isn't possible. Most likely what they mean is that there won't be a cap on your storage, which Google should definitely try.

I use Gmail every day. 6MB used so far. 3GB is a loooong way off.

Thunderstealers!

I agree with GuillaumeB. I don't really care that much about storage anymore. It's too bad that Yahoo mail doesn't offer many features like Gmail does. If they did, I think I would switch back to Yahoo.

I care about storage!!! I'm at about 50% on my primary box, and some of my customers are in the 90s that have been using it around a year. When you are in business it fills up quickly with all those excel, and pdf attachments... and Efaxes and such!

Hmmm … wasn’t it Google that first promised “infinity plus 1 storage”? Wasn’t that way back on April 1, 2005? Remember how Google's innovation shocked the stodgy old Yahoo and Microsoft and revolutionized online apps? Y and MS have been fighting to copy Google’s massive quota and speedy user interface ever since.

(Reference – http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/01/145241)

Now, two years later, Google is at 2.8 gigs and increasing every day. Is Yahoo expecting another April 1 announcement from Google, and they're just trying to beat them to the punch?

While I appreciate the “infinite storage”, it seems kinda like a cheap shot — Yahoo copies Google's creative idea, pretend it’s their own idea, and announce it less than a week before April Fools Day.

C’mon, Yahoo, you can do better than that! Be original. Be innovative. Come up with your own ideas!

Great news through but what concerns me is they need to modify their interface a bit.. making it more simple and fast to load

This week, for the nth time, gmail wouldn't let me send mail from my mobile as I had reached that storage limit. (Once again making me wish that I could sort mail on SIZE! grrrr!) So I look forward to the change on the Google side.

However, what caused me to note here was a comment from someone how "great" Yahoo's new mail client is. Oh my! I couldn't disagree more! It works well on some systems, but try it on a small form-factor display... TRY being the operative word here.

No, Yahoo's mail client has a long way to go before it could possibly replace gmail for me.

The world's only free mail service with unlimited storage:
http://www.mail2world.com

Google are screwgled :)

Boo hoo. Sunday's too long to wait for Google's new April Fool or "April Fool".

Upfront disclaimer — I work for AOL and lead the Mail Product Management & Business teams.

With all the talk about Yahoo and Gmail, I thought I'd jump in and note that AOL has offered unlimited email storage to its users since 2005. AOL is free to everyone via AOL.com.

Google is going to have to match this, no question. I was a long-time Yahoo mail user before I made the switch to Google. I still have and use my Yahoo, but it is no longer my 'primary' email. Ultimately, I use Outlook to just gather all my email into one Inbox, so web-based email isn't a major concern for me.

When I do use web-based email, I will say this about the two: Google's conversation feature is wonderful. As for Yahoo, their new Beta is amazing if you like to multi-task. It's like having Microsoft Outlook right in your browser, and everything just gets tabbed at the top. Google is not so friendly to multitasking. All this capability in Yahoo is without having to open new 'windows' and crowding the taskbar. At one point I had my inbox open, an email opened in a second tab, was composing a reply in a third tab, looking for something in my sent box in a fourth tab to paste into the reply i was composing, and in a fifth tab i was looking at the search results for a search I had run on my inbox... all in one single FF window. Can't do that in Google.

> 3GB is definitely enough to not throw anything away.

That depends on the user. If I wouldn't empty my boxes in regular intervals, I'd be hitting their limit. (I'm currently at 83%.)

they should have brought this out 2 years ago.... but gmail already made the big step with 1 and 2 gigs. Now as said before, you can't impress users that much anymore with more and more gigs.

and there is this rule: every additional gig that u are gonna get is gonna be less worth for you than the one before.....

+ don't forget, gmail will always have more storage (infinity +1, heheheh)

>That depends on the user. If I wouldn't empty my boxes in regular intervals, I'd be hitting their limit. (I'm currently at 83%.)

Jeez Philipp, you must get over a hundred emails a day! I get around five a day and i've never deleted anything since i got Gmail around two and a half years ago!

Screenshots may use a lot of storage (especially if they're JPEGs or BMPs).

Currently the "bulk" folder in yahoo mail doesn't count toward your quota.
Those mails expire and yahoo selects what goes in that folder.

Most of the mail I receive at yahoo is spam but not all goes into the bulk folder. A large amount is delivered to my "inbox".
Is yahoo going to be stuck saving large amounts of spam.
Are they going to make to make their spam filter better?

Google might have trouble outdoing unlimited or infinite storage.

I think that it might be appropriate for them to offer a googol bytes per mailbox.

Yahoo Mail is ugly. Too much unneeded clutter. I'll take Gmail anytime

I'm sure Google will unveil something better April the first :) At least, I hope it.

"I think the other shoe is going to drop tomorrow when Yahoo in all likelihood is going to announce a Yahoo Mail API, which would open up the service to third party developers."

--this will be big,very big--if an API for Y!mail is made avialable!!

I should add that because I get my DSL through what was one company, then SBC and now ATT, I have the "premium" for free and so my experience with Yahoo has never been cluttered with ads.

Here's the real killer Google could roll out: bigger attachments. We all have faster connections now. If I take 5 pictures on a fairly typical 6 megapixel camera at the highest quality, that far exceeds the 10MB limit in Google. It doesn't take as long to upstream 10MB on a home DSL or Cable connection these days.

There is certainly a diminishing return on email storage. Sure, Google could come out April 1 and say unlimited storage... and no one would hoop and holler. They would be 2nd out the gate (though perhaps first to actually roll it out). I think they could get more attention expanding attachments to 25 or even 50MB. Then when I have a small set of HQ pics I want to send I can.

That's funny Roy. I just logged into my AOL account and it says it is limited to 2 GB. Is this new?

I haven't checked in the past few months for a change, but I think the unlimited storage is only for aol subscribers who are paying for that unlimited storage; everyone else is limited to 2 gb "stored on aol". And if you don't move it to a 'saved on aol" folder within 30 days of receipt, aol will automatically delete email in your inbox..a pet peeve of mine as well as a sneeky way of decreasing the amount of space people use.

People seem to disagree about how much email storage they need, and what size attachments they'd like. We *wouldn't* need so much storage if we didn't need to send attachments. Google seems to be working toward a position where attachments are made less necessary, possibly eventually redundant. At the moment attaching some kinds of file – .doc, .xls – seems pretty old-fashioned and clunky. If you want someone to read a .doc file, you can share it with them through Google Docs; if you attach a .doc file the recipient can see it in Google Docs. What's missing is a way of sharing rather than attaching a document from within Gmail, as you're writing an email. You can receive but you can't send: the system is currently one-way only.

Perhaps the future is a sort of multi-function SHARE button rather than an attachment paperclip. You don't send the file; you send a link to the uploaded file on whatever Google server it's stored on (Picasaweb, YouTube, Google Video, Google Docs, Gdrive, whatever you call it. They could all be seen as part of a sort of proto-Gdrive, which is just missing synching with your hard drive and integration as a single viewable interface).

Gdrive or a proto-Gdrive could actually *reduce* Google's storage and bandwidth requirements. If you email someone a large .jpg attachment, Google stores it twice, once in the sender's Gmail account, once in the recipient's. And if you send it to all your friends they're stuffed. They should be doing everything they can to get people sharing rather than sending pictures etc.

Does that make sense?

It seems to me that the neat new function of the Google Talk module – whereby you can *see* a video or picture by just entering a link – is another sign of the future. There's no reason the same thing can't happen inside Gmail. Stick in a link to YouTube – or a video on your hard drive that is uploaded to YouTube by clicking the SHARE button – and the recipient sees it as a preview in the email you send; the video itself is stored, *once*, on Google's servers.

The other thing about a SHARE button. I hate browsing my hard drive to find the file I want to attach. These days, with Google Desktop etc, I never know where anything is stored. A nice SHARE button should have full search functionality, and it should be invisible to the user whether Google Docs or your computer or whatever is being searched. You want to send someone a picture of your cat? You press SHARE, type in "Jessie", and up pop some pictures, some stored in My Pictures, some in a Picasaweb album; you choose the one you like. If it's the one on your computer it gets uploaded to a server without your needing to know about it.

Roy Ben-Yoseph. "Aol is free to anyone here" you wouldnt let me sign up because I live in Ireland!