Yahoo plans to offer unlimited e-mail storage for free to 250 million webmail service users from May this year. The move is in response to exploding attachment sizes as consumers share more videos, photos and music via e-mail.

“We are watching the trend lines of how people are using e-mail…and they are sending more photos and videos and rich media,” said John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail.

“We are giving them no reason to ever have to delete old e-mails,” Yahoo co-founder David Filo said in a phone interview. “You can keep stuff forever.”

Yahoo Mail faces intense competition from both Gmail and Live Mail in this market. The company currently offers around 1 gigabyte of webmail to its customers. Microsoft’s Live Mail puts the limit at around 2 gigabytes while Google’s Gmail constantly increases the available space, which is now at around 2.8 gigabytes.

By contrast, Yahoo mail, which launched in 1997 only offers 4MB of storage. At that time, the common mobile storage for personal computers was a floppy disk with only 1.44 megabytes capacity.

“People should think about e-mail as something where they are archiving their lives,” Filo said. The company is also looking at lifting caps on storage for other services such as its Flickr photo-sharing service. “We are looking at those on a case-by-case basis,” he said.

The unlimited email storage however comes with some restrictions. The offer is for personal use and subject to guidelines against abuse that apply to Yahoo Mail. No one can build a business giving away unlimited storage to other consumers using Yahoo Mail, executives said.

This service excluded China and Japan where the company works in collaboration with local partners. We will continue working with these markets on their storage plans,” Kremer said in a statement.

The move makes Yahoo the first of the major free e-mail providers to offer unlimited storage, but it likely will not be the last.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, March 27th, 2007 at 8:21 pm under Storage, Technology.

Read more entries by Ruben Francia.
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