Yahoo's Free mail service Offers 1GB of storage

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Yahoo Inc. will increase the inbox capacity of its free Web mail service for the third time in the past 9 months, now raising storage to 1GB, exceeding Microsoft Corp.'s Hotmail and matching Google Inc.'s Gmail.

Yahoo Mail users all over the world will begin to see the larger inboxes between late April and early May, said Brad Garlinghouse, Yahoo's vice president of communications products.

Yahoo, in Sunnyvale, Calif., decided to increase the inbox capacity because it has become apparent that users are increasingly storing messages with large attachments, such as photos, he said.

Keeping up with user demands is important because Web mail service plays a big role in people's overall consumption of Yahoo content and services, Garlinghouse said.

"Today e-mail is a much richer and essential part of people's lives than it was five-plus years ago, and the more essential Yahoo Mail is to someone's life the more engaged they will be with the overall Yahoo network," he said.

Yahoo's Web mail is indeed a very important starting point for engaging users, said Charlene Li, a Forrester Research Inc. analyst. "The big three doorways (to Yahoo) are the homepage, My Yahoo and Yahoo Mail," she said.

In mid-2004, Yahoo increased the inbox size of its free Web mail service from 4MB to 100MB, and later to 250MB, which is the current capacity.

Web mail service providers of all sizes have increased their inbox storage in the past year as a reaction to Google's free Gmail service, which offers 1GB to its users. For example, Microsoft increased the inbox storage of its free Hotmail service from 2MB to 250MB after Gmail was announced.

Although Google triggered a massive reaction from Web mail providers when it announced Gmail in April 2004, Gmail remains in test, or beta, mode and isn't generally available except through invitations and through random offers via the main Google.com page.

With this move, Yahoo is anticipating the moment when Gmail is launched to the general public, so that inbox storage will not be a competitive advantage for Google, Li said.

Yahoo is also beefing up the free Yahoo Mail service's antivirus capabilities by allowing users to clean infected attachments, Garlinghouse said. This feature was previously only available to subscribers of Yahoo's fee-based Web mail service, which is called Yahoo Mail Plus and costs US$19.95 per year. Yahoo Mail Plus offers subscribers 2GB of inbox storage along with other features not available to free users.

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Yahoo Inc. is introducing a test version of a new service called PhotoMail that lets users insert up to 300 digital photographs into the body of an e-mail and store an unlimited numbers of photos on the Web and media company's computers.

The Sunnyvale, California-based company said late on Wednesday that users can also add borders and captions to photos embedded in the body of e-mails and can perform limited editing on them, such as rotating them or adjusting the size and quality of the image. "Photo sharing is enormously popular and thought by many to be too complicated," said Andy Spillane, vice president of Yahoo mail in an interview.

News source: Reuters