It’s hip2b2

Here is a scoop from Techcrunch on Yahoo announcing its decision to offer free unlimited electronic mail to its Yahoo mail users. Yes folks. That is free UNLIMITED email. So will people start moving to Yahoo?

Yahoo is announcing that all Yahoo Mail users will have free unlimited email storage starting in May 2007. The current storage limit is 1 GB per account (2 GB for $20/year premium users). With this change, Yahoo leapfrogs Gmail (2.8 GB and growing) and Live.com Mail (2GB). Yahoo mail currently has 250 million global users, more than any other online service (Live.com has 228 million and Gmail has 51 million users).

I spoke with Yahoo’s Vice President of Mail, John Kremer, this afternoon about the announcement. He says the new storage limits (or rather lack of a limit) affect all Yahoo mail users, not just users of the new beta product.

Techcrunch Free Mail Comparison

Things are definitely heating up in the free email front. With Gmail throwing the opening salvo by giving away 1GB free. Now, Yahoo answers with its unlimited service. Even with free unlimited email, people only have a certain amount of email that they can manage. Therefore, I don’t think the different between 2GB (and growing) and unlimited is a lot for the average user. I am pretty certain that as people have found creative ways to use Gmail they will find creative uses for Yahoo mail. These creative ways can even be made more creative by a possibly up and coming Yahoo Mail API (via GigaOM).

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.

Chad Dickerson from Yahoo Developers’ Network semi-announced this today at the ETech conference, though he did not specify a day when it is going to be released, though our sources are pointing to tomorrow. What could this API do? We will have to wait and find out the details, but a good start would be an offline client, saving us from those screen-hogging ads that Yahoo serves up.

Yup you read it right not only with Yahoo have unlimited storage for email. It will also allow you to manipulate this email using a nice and convenient Yahoo Mail API. The possibilities now seem to increase. Of course, Yahoo has a pretty restrictive terms of use. However, some of the initial applications would be online file system, web-based filling system and document management, online anything gallery, and many more. What will be Google and MSN’s answer?

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 29th, 2007 at 12:01 am and is filed under Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.