Yahoo! Mail Blog, UK and Ireland

Originally uploaded by squirrelmonkey

If you’ve been walking around central London lately, you may have already seen this pictured here. The Yahoo! bus is driving around the major sites of London for the next couple of weeks. We’re trying to get the word out that there are millions of new email addresses out there and they are yours for the taking.

My colleagues and I had a chance to ride around on the bus, and I saw a number of people taking snaps like this one from my Flickr colleague Fiona. I posted some pictures to my Flickr account too.

Have you seen the bus recently? Maybe you were one of the ones that took a picture? Why not post it to Flickr with the tag “yahoo bus”?

Happy snapping.
Andrew - Yahoo! Mail Team

So, were you successful in getting the email name that you’ve always wanted? That’s great news!! Now, are you trying to decide how to let everyone know that you’ve got a terrific new email address? And maybe you’re wondering if you can move all your mail and contacts over to that new ymail or rocketmail account. Well have I got a tool for!!!

How can I let people know that I have a new email address?
Whether you are coming from hotmail (yuck), gmail (blech) or even another yahoo (hooray!) email account, we’ve got tool that automatically moves everything from your old email address to your new ymail, rocketmail and/or yahoo.co.uk email address. It couldn’t be easier.

A little while back, my colleagues and I created a video that shows just how easy it is. I’ve included it on this post. But before you hit the play button, I just want to point out a couple of small differences from when we made the video (and believe me they are small).
1. You now have a choice to move everything to @ymail.com and @rocketmail.com
2. You can no longer move calendar items.
3. It can take up to 24 hours to move everything over (so keep checking)

Just take a look at this video (or click here for a full screen version)…

See how easy that was? Check it out for yourself

If you that can’t place where you know the music from… It’s “Maybe Tomorrow” by Terry Bush the theme song from the TV series “The Littlest Hobo”

Happy Switching!
Andrew - Yahoo! Mail Team

Hot off the presses…. We’ve just added two new domains to the Yahoo! Mail family. Now you can get that same top-notch Yahoo! Mail experience but with “@ymail.com” or “@rocketmail.com”.

What that means is that you have more opportunity to get the email address that you’ve always wanted. I’m sure you might be happy with bob1123322@yahoo.co.uk, but wouldn’t you prefer just plain bobby@ymail.com? Well, now you have the chance to get the name that you want.

Just go to www.yahoo.co.uk/ymail and register your new email address. I’m going to get mine right now.

Happy registering!
Andrew – Yahoo! Mail Team

p.s. For you history buffs out there, Rocketmail was the creation of Four 11, the company that Yahoo! bought in 1997 that launched Yahoo! Mail.

As Yahoo! Mail approaches its 10-year anniversary, I’m the lucky one who gets to announce that we will begin offering everyone unlimited email storage starting in May 2007. To mark the occasion, I checked in with David Nakayama, our group vice president of engineering, for some perspective on this milestone. In case that name doesn’t ring a bell, he’s the developer of RocketMail, one of the world’s first webmail products, which Yahoo! acquired and relaunched as Yahoo! Mail in 1997.

Dave reminisced: “I remember getting in a room to plan our RocketMail launch over a decade ago and worrying that our original plan of a 2MB quota wasn’t enough, and that we needed to be radical and DOUBLE the storage to 4MB per account! It’s ironic that I routinely send and receive individual mail attachments bigger than that now. Our total capacity for mail accounts back then was 200GB for all of our customers. At Yahoo!, we’re now receiving more inbound mail than that every 10 minutes.”

When Yahoo! Mail launched 10 years ago, users got a whopping 4MB of storage for their entire mailbox. Today, you would fill that up with a single picture from your weekend.

This got me thinking about how the storage capacity of other popular technology products has changed. A quick snapshot:

• 1997: Yahoo! Mail launches with 4MB of storage
• SanDisk introduces 2MB flash card for the Canon PowerShot.
• Compaq announces “high capacity memory upgrades” in four capacities, including 16MB, 32MB, 64MB, and 128MB capacities.
• Caleb introduces the Ultra High Density floppy disk drive that stores up to 144MB on a single disk.
• The first iPod is still a gleam in someone’s eye. It isn’t introduced until 2001 and comes with 5GB of storage.

• 2004/2005: Yahoo! Mail upgrades in 2004 to 100MB of storage, followed by a jump to 1GB in 2005
• Olympus upgrades to 1GB flash memory card.
• HP announces a 160GB storage upgrade for its Media Center PCs.
• Corsair in 2005 announces a USB flash drive with 4GB of storage.
• Apple announces the Fifth Generation iPod with 30GB capacity, and launches the newest 80GB iPod, which holds up to 100 hours of video, in 2006.

• 2007: Yahoo! Mail announces Unlimited Email Storage
• SanDisk launches 8GB flash card for photo storage
• Alienware introduces a desktop computer with 1 terabyte of storage

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. And like any responsible webmail service, we have anti-abuse limits in place to protect our users. BTW: As much as we’d like to just flip a switch and “unlimit” everyone on the same day, we’ll be rolling this out over a few months to ensure a smooth transition — we know there’s virtually nothing more precious than your inbox.

We hope we’re setting a precedent for the future. Someday, can you imagine a hard drive that you can never fill? Never having to empty your photo card on your camera to get space back? Enough storage to fit the world’s music, and then some, on your iPod? Sounds like a future without limits.

Beats a slice of birthday cake, eh?
John Kremer, VP of Yahoo! Mail