Yahoo will increase the storage capacity of its free and
fee-based web-based e-mail services.
The free service will see capacity increase from 4Mbytes to
100Mbytes, while users of the fee-based service will get
2Gbytes.
In addition, Yahoo is simplifying pricing for its fee-based
e-mail service, which is called Yahoo Mail Plus. The service will
cost $19.99 (£11) a year. This represents a discount for all
subscribers who had paid $29.99 for 25Mbytes, $39.99 for 50Mbytes
and $59.99 for 100Mbytes.
The increase in storage will be rolled out globally by the end
of the year. The new price will be available to subscribers when
their existing annual agreement ends.
"We're announcing these improvements to our service, with a
refreshed user interface and a storage increase. Our goal is to
provide a full-featured service, and now we've taken storage off
the table. People don't even have to think twice about it," said
Terrell Karlsten, a Yahoo spokeswoman.
Limited storage in web-based e-mail services has been a headache
for many users, who see messages sent to them get bounced back if
their inbox is full. This forces users to constantly delete
messages from their inbox to make room for incoming ones.
But in April, Google rocked the market when it announced it was
developing a free web-based e-mail service called Gmail with 1Gbyte
of storage capacity.
Gmail still is not generally available, but Yahoo's move is a
clear reaction to the imminent arrival of that competing service,
said Marcel Nienhuis, an analyst at The Radicati Group.
By responding to Google's move with this increase in storage,
Yahoo will give a good enough reason for most of its existing users
to stay put and not move over to Gmail, he said.
"Anything above 50Mbytes is plenty of storage, so providing
100Mbytes for free is very generous and pretty attractive. Most
users will be very happy with it," Nienhuis said. "The 2Gbytes for
the fee-based service is pretty much unlimited storage for all
practical purposes."
Yahoo is also announcing other enhancements to its e-mail
services including:
- a redesigned user interface for both services;
- for users of the free service, an increase in the maximum size
of a single message from 3Mbytes to 10Mbytes;
- an improvement in the back-end system powering the search
function of the two e-mail services, which should result in faster
query results; this search feature is an existing one, and lets
users search the full-text and subject lines of the e-mail messages
in their inbox by keyword;
- the availability of 50 million e-mail handles or names that had
at some point been claimed by users but that have been dormant for
years;
- the removal of all graphical ads from the fee-based service;
these ads will continue to exist in the free service; the only ads
that will appear in the fee-based service will be text-based ads
promoting Yahoo offerings only
Users in the following markets will receive the redesigned user
interface and the increase in free storage to 100Mbytes: US, UK,
Ireland, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil,
Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea.
Juan Carlos Perez writes for IDG News Service