Yahoo!'s plans to offer unlimited email storage for users of its web mail storage set the stage for a new level of rivalry between itself, Google and MSN. But will Australian users really be able to take advantage of it?
‪Using email is rather like being a groupie -- you can never get enough gigs. In that context, Yahoo!'s announcement that it is now offering unlimited capacity for its web mail service is the equivalent of a permanent backstage pass and unlimited condoms.
In a blog posting earlier today, Yahoo! mail vice president John Kremer announced that Yahoo! would begin rolling out unlimited mailboxes to existing users in May.
"We're psyched to be breaking new ground in the digital storage frontier by giving our users the freedom to never worry about deleting old messages again," Kremer wrote. "We hope we're setting a precedent for the future."
While many similar upgrades start in the US and only hit other markets months or years later, local officials promise that Australia won't be in the also-ran list. "This is a global release, so all of our countries will be getting unlimited storage in the near future," Mark Helvadjian, head of communications, community and front doors (just what you want on your business card, isn't it?) at Yahoo!7, the local joint venture between Yahoo! and Channel Seven, told APC.
As the "near future" comment suggests, web mail users can't quite anticipate bombarding each other with gigantic video files as soon as May 1 passes. "It will be rolling over a few months just to ensure that everything works," Helvadjian said. (Yahoo! hasn't set a public end date for the shift.)
Just how Yahoo! will stop people from using an unlimited capacity service as a default file sharing service isn't entirely clear. "We do have systems in place to monitor usage and ensure that there isn't any abuse," Helvadjian said, but he declined to discuss specifics.
It seems safe to assume that such monitoring includes checking for frequent logins to single email accounts from wildly divergent IPs. It also seems safe to assume that even now, an enthused coder is working on a way to build a virtual drive that takes advantage of the newly available infinite capacity.
Helvadjian predicted that the announcement would effectively end the "capacity wars" which have dominated online mail services in recent years. "Instead of playing that game of giving a little bit extra and waiting for something else, we thought we'd make it infinite and tell people they don't have to worry about," he said.
If prior history is any guide, Yahoo!'s main rivals in the web mail space, Google and MSN, will soon offer similar deals (though the fact that Google only recently started charging for high-capacity mail might slow it down a touch).
One issue Australian users will need to consider anew in that scenario is their upload speeds. It's all very well being allowed to send and store multi-gigabyte attachments, but if you have to wait several hours to do so, it's a dubious benefit.