Yahoo to expand storage on web mail

Yahoo is to offer its web mail users unlimited storage capacity.

The capacity upgrade, set to be offered this May - the 10th anniversary of the launch of Yahoo Mail, will not be available to all users at the same time. The upgrade will be rolled out users over a period of several months, wrote John Kremer, the vice president of Yahoo Mail, in a post on the Yodel Anecdotal blog.

The announcement ups the ante for rival Google, which rolled out its Gmail service several years ago with an initial capacity of 1GB per user. That capacity has steadily expanded over time and now exceeds 2.5GB.

"We hope we're setting a precedent for the future. Someday, can you imagine a hard drive that you can never fill?" Kremer wrote. Yahoo Mail users now have a maximum capacity of 1GB for their mailboxes.

While holding out the promise of unlimited storage capacity for Yahoo Mail users, Yahoo appears to have defined limits for how users can use the storage capacity of their inboxes. In his post, Kremer noted that Yahoo has developed "anti-abuse limits" for users, although Kremer's post did not detail what those limits will be.