It was announced on March the 27th, so it’s a good five days away from April Fools. However, it does sound like a prank: “Yahoo! announces that it’s offering free unlimited e-mail storage starting May this year”. When I first found out, it seemed rather far-fetched, and it still does.

Basically, this means that Yahoo! is giving up one method of income, from users who payed 20$ per year for 2GB of space (and it’s losing those money from users starting May, as they will be refunded, if they want to), and it engages in the race to buy a LOT of storage space.

Irrealistic as it seems, this comes at a turning point in Yahoo!’s mail service. 10 years ago, Yahoo! Mail was being launched, a service which was capable of holding up to 4MB of mail, more than an average attachment today.

On the other hand, this might seem like a method of distracting people from GMail’s gimmick of the ever-expanding mailbox. Whether or not it will work, only time will tell. My guess is it won’t, mainly because people don’t look for storage space when they analyze possible e-mail accounts. Not unless they plan on using that space specifically to store stuff, rather than storing them on their on computer. While this might seem like a godsend for those kinds of people, it’s not. Yahoo!’s service states that abusive accounts will be suspended, however leaving their owners with the possibility of accessing their accounts and their stored data.

Instead of a conclusion, let’s look at what John Kremer, the Vice-President of Yahoo! Mail, said in his announcement:

We hope we’re setting a precedent for the future. Someday, can you imagine a hard drive that you can never fill? Never having to empty your photo card on your camera to get space back? Enough storage to fit the world’s music, and then some, on your iPod? Sounds like a future without limits.

Very optimistic words, but is it really possible? My guess is it’s not. Because Yahoo!’s Mail is not unlimited, it just means they will have to acquire an enormous ammount of extra storage space to fit the e-mails of approximately 250 million people worldwide. This is something that you can not do, with today’s technology, with your iPod.

I am writing this more as a review and a short story rather than a survey, despite the question mark in the title. Along the years, I was put in the position of using many mail software applications, from the early versions of the classic Outlook Express to the useless-featured IncrediMail. However, I had a computer at that time that was the best source of troubles I have ever seen. Everything was going down so fast, and despite my backups, I was losing my e-mails, contacts and important information. I was living in an era when CD-RW’s were highly expensive, and my internet connection was dial-upped. My ISP was providing a 1MB e-mail address and I thought that’s more than enough for what I needed. Anyway, enough with the story. I’m trying to evidence the ups and downs of the POP3 compared to the webmail.

If I would have been asked this years back, I would have taken a strong moral stand in favor of POP3 because it seemed like the best option, unlimited space (I had most of my HDD to extend to), offline browsing (dial-up access was a luxury) and I could customize my client just the way I liked it. I had about 20 filters against spam, even if I was receiving about 5 e-mails/week and just a few more spam messages. Like I was saying, despite of the fact that I was losing my mails regularly due formatting, viruses and such, I still was a fan of OE and other POP3 applications.

On the other hand, today, when you are subscribed to so many forums, registered on so many websites and talking on so many e-mailing lists, the 1MB storage space would have been too little. Luckily, they all realized that and increased the storage space over time. Another important aspect is mobility and I got to realize that as soon as I needed to access the Internet from somewhere else (work, school, friends), but I also needed my e-mails. *poof*. Suddenly, the whole webmail alternative wasn’t looking so bad.
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After a three days period when we all asked ourselves if Gmail will ever increase the storage space again, the figures started to increase again.
About 20 hours ago, it seems that Gmail started counting from 2,8GB and already added over 1MB :)

For those of you who don’t remember, Gmail started as a potential April fool’s day joke from Google in April 2004 with 1GB storage. After one year, on 1st of April 2005, Google announced that Gmail DOUBLES the storage space up to 2GB. This was of course received by users as a potentially joke, but the increasing process never stopped counting ever since… That until three days ago.

As some of you might have noticed the storage space for Gmail stopped increasing since January 1st 2007. In April 2005 Google made the leap from 1G to 2G and the growth never stopped since then. As those who watch carefully stated the storage quota increased with about 0.33 MB a day ever since.

It’s said that the sudden stop occurred due to the omission of the code that increase the storage quota after 31 December 2006. This might be true for we know Google to be quite lavish with storage space but it remains to be seen how quick will the problem be solved and how much is the storage limit going to increase after all.