Yahoo Boosts Email Space in response to Gmail 707
coleslawjoe writes "This article at New York Times explains that Yahoo has decided to boost their E-mail space (Soul sucking registration required) from their current 4 megabytes to 100 in response to Gmail. They are also planning to offer 2 gig mailboxes for $19.99(USD)."
How about instead... (Score:1, Interesting)
The only reason people keep them around is that they're too lazy to delete them themselves. Not because they want to refer back to them.
It's a hell of a lot more irritating that email doesn't get through because your mailbox is full then it is if you lose the email of the latest oversized video file people were sending a year ago.
hrmmm 2 gig for $20 or 1 gig for free? (Score:4, Interesting)
big Surprise (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm personally waiting for gmail to come out of beta and then I'll probably move from yahoo to google locak, stock and two smoking spam filters!
Offtopic, but why does google engender a warm fuzzy feeling of trust whereas yahoo, hotmail and the rest "feel" like corporates out to make a quick buck? It's a totally false feeling, but it's happens...
2GB Mailboxes (Score:2, Interesting)
I've gotta say, I think it's going to be hard for Gmail to compete. The Gmail Web interface isn't all that impressive and presuming that Yahoo and MSN can get their spam filtering and storage space up to snuff (Yahoo's got the space and the hotmail spam filtering is actually really good now), Google doesn't really have the breadth of services that the other guys do.
That said, they're smart guys, so hopefully they're working on something better than what they're beta testing.
I'm glad to see Yahoo... (Score:4, Interesting)
Interactive Ad-Games: The Spam of the Future! (Score:2, Interesting)
How long before spam starts including multimedia files that eat up the extra allocation? Now that so many people have broadband, there's no reason to stick to smaller messages. Emails may start to include much more advanced/annoying graphics, sounds and maybe interactive ad-games.
Re:How about instead... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:YEP! Slashdot, bait and grab! (Score:3, Interesting)
annoying I can only delete 25 messages at a time.. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:aah, yahoo is /.'d! (Score:5, Interesting)
I logged into my account and it was still using the old interface and had the old 4-megabyte limit. It wasn't until I logged in like 10 minutes ago that I logged in to see the new interface, although a bit broken
Cool. More spam (Score:2, Interesting)
That's what I get for subscribing to that Campus Crusade for Habakkuk list
Comparison (Score:3, Interesting)
Let me ponder on that thought while I delete my 200 + spam mails a day, that I need to sort through manually to inspect that it does not contain any of my friends.
The 200 + spam mails a day is a recent event. About two-three months ago I used to average about 20-40 a day - all of a sudden there was a huge surge.
I won't mind giving Gmail a try and hope their spam filters are better. While I do not mind a skyscraper ad, on the side of my email, I do mind pop-ups/under. I hope that the ads they propose won't contain porn/hate websites....it would be annoying if I am at work trying to read my email but cannot due to the half naked woman to the right of my e-mail.
Re:big Surprise (Score:5, Interesting)
Wait till they go public.
Today while typing a personal (naughty) message to friends on Gmail, I did feel uneasy knowing that I'll be "profiled" by AI bots, so I toned down the language
Originally I wanted to use Gmail for my personal stuff ('cause it "never" goes out of date) and Yahoo for memberships, resumes, etc., but I'm thinking about reversing my decision and doing the opposite.
Well, for all we know, Yahoo might be doing the same, but still, at least I don't know about it.
Re:100mb? WOW! (Score:5, Interesting)
-MT.
Brilliant strategy! (Score:3, Interesting)
Hmm. Now, let's figure out which business deal is better, shall we?
Do I either,
A) Pay $20 for a 2 gig Yahoo box, or
B) Open up 2 GMail accounts for free and still have 2 gigs of storage.
Now, the true genius will suddenly realize that if you open 3 accounts, that means you have 3 gigs of space, and that's more than 2 gigs that Yahoo offers. How many of you figured that one out?
Re:100mb? WOW! (Score:5, Interesting)
Thus, right now, today, I am sitting with a 2 gig mailbox with no adverts. Google will have to get their product out the door sharpish to overcome the inertia that Yahoo is creating right now.
The first encounter with the new interface (Score:2, Interesting)
Funnily (is that a word?
Still trying to like the new interface, though.
Competition is good, isn't it?
If only there were two blondes trying to please me...
Re:Bugs, Bugs. (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's a snippet from my e-mail:
You are currently exceeding your Yahoo! Mail storage quota by a very large amount. You are only allowed -2048.0MB of storage but you are currently using 0.0MB of storage. Your account has been temporarily disabled from receiving new messages.
The easiest way to continue receiving your important email is to expand your mailbox. Yahoo! Mail offers 10, 25, 50 and 100MB of storage space starting at just $9.99/year.
Nice to know that I can only have negative storage. Looks like they want me to give them storage. Not exactly sure how I'm supposed to do that... At least it's just an account that comes with my DSL that I don't use.
Not all Yahoo! email boxes 4Meg (Score:5, Interesting)
The first thought I had though since being notified of the increase was, "How the heck am I going to keep track of all the junk I'll eventually have to delete?" My answer was, "To never allow it to clog in the first place by removing immediately any e-mails that I may want to save." The obvious answer.
IIRC, Yahoo only allows you to set up 10 rules for handling the email you receive. This is troublesome because now that we've been given so much free space, I know people will want to seperate their space by using folders - ideally, automatically - for just about everything and everyone they know. But, if 10 rules are the limit, I see in the future that limitations on space won't be the driving factor in attracting customers. Once again, it will all boil down to service and services available (options, rules, etc.) to the end user.
Heh (Score:2, Interesting)
Current SBC DSL Customers (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Cool. More spam (Score:3, Interesting)
I actually think that Yahoo's spam filtering is very good. I only get a few false positives a month. And there is also a mailbox-specific domain blocker that you have control over.
Pretty good service for free, methinks.
P.S. Thanks for Slahdotting mail.yahoo.com guys! Now I can't check my mail!
how to get rid of ads (Score:5, Interesting)
Just ask everyone to put the word "died" at the end of their messages. Gmail has this filter that tries not to be too insensitive by plastering your browser with ads for caskets next to news that Uncle Bob just died, so I guess it searches for words like that.
I tried with the words "disaster", "died", etc. and they all caused ads to disappear.
It might be creepy though after a while if every email had the word "died" at the bottom.... )
Re:100mb? WOW! (Score:3, Interesting)
The article said they are going to allow people to download mail to third party email clients. This is great! Yahoo seems to be saying: We don't care about the pittance we make off email banner adverts, we are willing to TRUELY GIVE you a larger mailbox than your ISP just to keep you using yahoo for other stuff.
I doubt most people will use third party mail clients anyway: Going to a web page is easy, typing in smtp.yahoo.com into an email client ( what's that? ) is 'hard'. Plus most people would be pissed if they accidentally clicked 'delete from server' and couldn't get their email at their friend's house.
Google searching email is a feature they won't be able to duplicate easily, but how useful will that really be? I for one wouldn't trust google's search algorithm to find all occurances of a string in web pages. For instance: I type A55M0NKEY ( a word that doesn't occur on the web unless I put it there ) and I do not find everything I have ever posted. If someone used 'A55M0NKEY' in a message, would google's search be guaranteed to find it? If not, then Yahoo could come up with a more-useful-for-email-searching-algorithm easily, and if it were also willing to store seperate indexes for each user privately, they would have a completely better service than GMail.
Google has been the king of search almost since it came out. News, Newsgroups, Froogle, and Images are great. The features unique to yahoo have been the ones that require a login - email, IM, chat, personals, commerce, billionsweeps.com. The search engine changes so often, it's only intermittantly useful.
Google thusfar has not required an ID for any of it's services ( except to post on groups.google.com, but most use of that is archive searching which doesn't require a login ID, who wants to reply to a 10 year old usenet thread? )
Gmail gets people to create a google login. What else do you think they will offer now that they've got you to sign in? How much of that crap will end up on their front page?
Microsoft's response for Hotmail!!! (Score:2, Interesting)
The only changes that I had seen in hotmail in the past 3-4 years are a decrease in the inbox space to a mere 2 megs, some zazzy icons and some improvements in the spam filtering.
People say Microsoft doesn't go innovative with their browser, OSes and the office suites because of almost zero competition (ie after ensuring that competition is almost zero). But what in the free-email wars??
Or is it that hotmail is doomed to be lost in history like the dot-com boom of which it had been one of the catalysts
Look at what else you get for $20 ($0 w/ SBC DSL) (Score:2, Interesting)
Ask and you shall receive.
"AddressGuard [yahoo.com] is a feature of your Yahoo! Mail Plus subscription. It lets you create disposable email addresses to use whenever you do not want to give out your real Yahoo! Mail Address.
Messages sent to any of your disposable email addresses will be automatically forwarded to your Yahoo! Mail account, and you can decide to direct these messages to a specific folder.
If any of your disposable email addresses start getting spam, you can simply delete it and messages sent to this address will start bouncing instead of filling up your account."
Great, but now email isn't working at all (Score:2, Interesting)
Thanks yahoo.
It wouldn't be a problem normally, but I had an email about an interview in it I needed to check. Had to call the contact without knowing his name. Never quite heard it when I talked to him before, and naturally it was not a simply name like Bob, Jim, Jack, or Phil.
Re:big Surprise (Score:1, Interesting)
Today while typing a personal (naughty) message to friends on Gmail, I did feel uneasy knowing that I'll be "profiled" by AI bots, so I toned down the language :-) Really creepy!
I hope there are no spam filters between you and your friends. Spam filters actually read what you have written! How creepy!
Yes, I'm being sarcastic. What, you think Google's programs are going to become sentient and then make fun of you for what you have written? Get a grip!
Re:How about instead... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:100 MB of storage is quite good. (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't give a company credit for innovation when all they are doing is responding to REAL innovation. Gmail, from what I've seen so far is better, faster, has an interesting alternative to folders which may prove to be more effective, and has a commitment to continue adding features to their free service. Google has no add on services that you can pay for and I think they intend to keep it that way. They have Yahoo and MSN quaking in their boots and I think thats a good thing.
I'll stick with Gmail until something BETTER, not just AS GOOD comes along.
Re:This is how storage space claim will be rendere (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know if you've actually tried Yahoo's Plus service, but I have it and it rocks. Besides the 2GB storage space, I *DO* have POP access to my Yahoo mail account. Couple that with Yahoo's near perfect spam filtering (I see maybe 2 or 3 spam a day out of about 500 I receive every day), and it's really a helluva service.
Besides email Yahoo also gives me a personal home page that is VERY configurable, a nice address book with import/export capabilities, a personal calendar, a personal file area (briefcase), etc. Does Google provide all that? I doubt it. On top of that, they would have to provide a better version of all that in order for people like me to care.
There currently ARE some response time issues with Yahoo mail, but those may be related to the Akamai issues noted on today's
We'll see how it all pans out. But for now, Yahoo gets actual money from me and Google does not.
Storage comes second -- boolean search rocks! (Score:3, Interesting)
It's been awhile since I had a Yahoo! account, but what I remember of it was pretty much like every other Web-based email system -- every other, except Gmail. Sure, sure, the storage space is nice, but that's just a component of what really makes Gmail useful: Full-featured search capability.
Here's an example, from which you can extrapolate your own interests (coding, or recipes, or political commentary, etc., instead of models). As a photographer [musecube.com], I like to be kept informed about new models in my area who have signed up with OneModelPlace.com [onemodelplace.com]. So, I have signed up with that site to get automated notifications, which now go to my Gmail account. When I get a notification, I decide -- by looking at the model's portfolio -- whether it's a "keeper" or not. If not, I delete it, because I don't want it coming up in my searches later. If it's a keeper, I tack on a "Interesting Models" label and archive the message. That's where the big storage helps.
Then, when I want to find a model that meets certain criteria, I can do a search in my Gmail account. For example, I could do a search for "nude AND edmonds" if I wanted to find a model in Edmonds, WA who is available for nude work. This is better than doing a search on OMP directly, because I know the model's portfolio isn't "stale" (since some "models" on OMP are no longer modeling), and I've already culled out those models I probably wouldn't be interested in working with (for whatever reason -- cost, looks, etc.), so my results in my Gmail search are prequalified.
Other features of Gmail are nice, but not necessarily unique. For example, Opera's email client allows the use of labels (although I haven't used that client enough to know if they work as well as Gmail's label feature). Other features are underpowered or missing -- if you're looking for a Web-based email address that has lots of integration gimmicks, then Gmail doesn't cut it, at least not yet. But for raw power for the core purpose of handling email, I'm liking Gmail more and more.
Obviously, as with any Web-based email, or really any non-encrypted email, there are privacy concerns, but those can be managed. While I probably won't use Gmail for personal mail very often (if ever), I certainly will use it for newsletters and other content that I might want to be able to search in the future.
Re:100mb? WOW! (Score:3, Interesting)
yahoo shows only a blank page. (yeah yeah, akamai net.outage. yeah yeah).
gmail for me. I love my account.
bye bye yahoo. you're a has-been.
Re:I don't get it (Score:2, Interesting)
Kids today.