Yahoo has celebrated its mail service's tenth birthday by giving its users unlimited mail storage, responding to explosive growth in attachment sizes as people share ever more photos, music and videos via e-mail.
From May, Yahoo will eliminate the one-gigabyte cap on memory for people with free e-mail accounts and two-gigabyte cap of memory for those who pay for premium accounts.
Yahoo Mail is one of the most popular web-based e-mail service and had more than 250 million users.
Originally Yahoo only offered account holders four MB per account. Yahoo said its "e-mail server farms" could handle the storage load and the company will invest in improved capacity where necessary.
Microsoft has a 2 gigabyte free e-mail storage limit, while Google caps its Gmail service at 2.8 gigabytes.
"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."
Officials said the decision to remove e-mail storage limits reflects the plunging cost of storage as new personal computers store up to a trillion bytes of data and owners of 80-gigabyte iPods can carry 100 hours of video in their pockets.
Starting in May, the changeover to unlimited storage should take a month, said John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail.
One caveat Yahoo makes is that 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.
Two countries -- China and Japan -- are excluded.
Filo said Yahoo is 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.
From May, Yahoo will eliminate the one-gigabyte cap on memory for people with free e-mail accounts and two-gigabyte cap of memory for those who pay for premium accounts.
Yahoo Mail is one of the most popular web-based e-mail service and had more than 250 million users.
Originally Yahoo only offered account holders four MB per account. Yahoo said its "e-mail server farms" could handle the storage load and the company will invest in improved capacity where necessary.
Microsoft has a 2 gigabyte free e-mail storage limit, while Google caps its Gmail service at 2.8 gigabytes.
"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."
Officials said the decision to remove e-mail storage limits reflects the plunging cost of storage as new personal computers store up to a trillion bytes of data and owners of 80-gigabyte iPods can carry 100 hours of video in their pockets.
Starting in May, the changeover to unlimited storage should take a month, said John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail.
One caveat Yahoo makes is that 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.
Two countries -- China and Japan -- are excluded.
Filo said Yahoo is 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.
