Yahoo! has announced that it is to offer its 250 million email clients unlimited storage capacity from May. In an announcement timed to coincide with the service's tenth birthday, the world's biggest email provider said that the decision had been made in response to the explosive growth in attachment size as people share more photos, music and videos via email.
"We are giving them no reason to ever have to delete old emails," Yahoo co-founder David Filo told Reuters. "You can keep stuff forever."
He added that many people now routinely send attachments larger than Yahoo!'s original storage allocation of four megabytes per user. When the company's free email addresses were launched in 1997 the total memory allocation for the service was 200 gigabytes.
The company currently offers one gigabyte per user, compared to two gigabytes per Hotmail account or 2.8 gigabytes from Gmail.
"We have been closely monitoring average usage. We are comfortable that our users are far under one gigabyte, on average," said Yahoo! vice president John Kremer. "What we see are an increasing number of rich media files as consumers send more photos."
The accounts will be subject to certain non-abuse clauses, such as requirements that the accounts will only be for personal use and will not be offered as commercialised storage space.
Users in Japan and China will not be immediately included in the offer. The decision is also a reflection of rapidly falling storage costs, with modern PCs offering storage of up to a terabyte.
