Yahoo! Mail Blog, UK and Ireland

This time I’m not talking about unlimited storage. I’m talking about our mascot Liam – and boy he’s a big one. Think New York’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade big.

see more pics on Flickr

To celebrate the fact that we’re removing beta from Yahoo! Mail Beta, the team at Yahoo!’s campus in Sunnyvale celebrated with an enormous, inflatable Liam. Over 40 feet tall and able to float over tall buildings in a single bound, the celebration was meant to be as big as all the features we’ve been able to pack into the new Yahoo! Mail.

Consider these features:

• Unlimited storage
• Drag and drop
• Preview pane
• Select multiple messages
• Right-click
• Keyboard shortcuts
• And more….

Coming soon
The term “beta” will be removed from Yahoo! Mail Beta in a short while. We’ve all worked very hard to bring you the best mail product available, and will continue to work hard to keep it the best.

Why’s he called Liam?
Well, he’s actually based on a real person on the Yahoo! Mail team. But his name was chosen for a good reason. Can you guess it? Read it backwards…

Happy emailing
Andrew – Yahoo! Mail Beta Team (soon to be just Yahoo! Mail Team )

Sun, sand and surf. How on earth are you going to check your email when on holiday? I figure you probably fall into one of 2 categories:

You are either:

1. No work, no computers, no technology. You want to get away from it all and not be contactable. But if you’re going to be off globe-trotting around the world or just lazing on the beach for two to three weeks, why don’t you let your friends and family know that you’re away. Just use the “Holiday Response” in the Options menu of Yahoo Mail and respond to everyone when you get back. And now that you have unlimited storage, you don’t have to worry about pesky limits again.

or…

2. An email junkie. You’re so connected that you check your mail everyday whether from your laptop, your friends’ laptop, a cyber-café or the hotel lobby. You just can’t go a day without checking your email.

Mail just got mobile
If you fall into the #2 camp, why don’t you take your mail with you? Use your mobile phone to check your mail. It’s easy and free (of course your provider might charge you for internet access). You can check it out if you have a WAP compatible mobile phone. Just type http://uk.m.yahoo.com into your phone’s browser and you can get your email, contacts, and even Yahoo! Messenger.

For a more enhanced experience, why not try Yahoo! Go. It’s a feature rich java application that makes it easy and fun to access the Internet. If you’re a true email junkie, then Yahoo! Go is for you. Check it out. All your emails are there when you want them. Email is automatically pushed to your phone and syncs with your Web account (for example: delete a message on your mobile and it is reflected on Webmail).

Believe it or not, I’m a #1 kind of guy.
Have a great summer!!
Andrew – Yahoo! Mail Beta Team

To celebrate unlimited storage here in the Yahoo! offices we brought in some big (and I mean big) food stuffs. Who doesn’t like a cheese wedge that’s almost 5 feet tall? I’ve snapped some pics and uploaded to Flickr – our favorite photo sharing site. You can see all the pictures here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ymail_uk_team/.

Free, unlimited storage means that Yahoo! Mail is the only email address that grows with you and lasts a lifetime. So now there’s no longer any excuse for letting your photos, files and other digital media collect dust in a cardboard box at the back of a cupboard somewhere.

Yep – and that’s me next to the giant sundae. And boy was that one whopper of a brain freeze.

Happy emailing!!
Andrew – Yahoo! Mail Beta Team

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