Yawns, cheers for 'unlimited' webmail inbox storage

As webmail providers continue their years-long race to increase their inbox storage, some analysts and users are cheering them on, while others question whether the emphasis on this issue is warranted and even if it can become counterproductive.

This week, Yahoo pledged that, starting in May, it will begin to offer unlimited storage to Yahoo Mail users, something AOL's AOL Mail has had since September of last year. Meanwhile, Google continually increases Gmail's storage, which now is at over 2.8GB per user.

Until about three years ago, most major webmail providers offered very limited storage, often in the 2MB to 10MB range. This forced users to regularly delete or download their e-mail messages instead of keeping them on the webmail providers' servers. That all changed in April 2004 with Google's introduction of Gmail and its then-unprecedented 1GB inbox, which ignited the storage race.

Depending on who you ask, the importance placed by vendors on inbox size is either justified or exaggerated.

"Large storage is nice but not necessarily a huge consumer priority. When you give consumers a list of features and ask them to prioritize what's most important to them, storage is kind of middle of the road," said Joe Laszlo, a Jupiter Research analyst. Instead, what's vital to the average person is security, namely protection against threats like fraud, spam, phishing, and malware, Laszlo said.

However, Teney Takahashi, an analyst with The Radicati Group, thinks that as storage has grown, webmail services are more than tools for exchanging messages because their gigantic inboxes have become repositories of important data and documents for users.

"People are storing purchase documents, contact information, bank statements, utility bills, and it's very convenient for them to have all this historical data available in their e-mail inbox," Takahashi said.

Users seem equally split. Dan Moore, a Yahoo Mail user since 2002, cares little about this week's unlimited storage announcement because he's not even close to reaching the 2GB limit of his inbox.

"As far as I can tell, I'll never need to delete another e-mail message, but if I did run into a limit, it'd be very easy for me to pull down the messages via the POP interface and store them on a personal hard drive," he said.

Others, like Chaim Danzinger, a freelance video editor in Pasadena, California, welcome Yahoo's move. Danzinger, who uses Yahoo Mail for personal and work matters, is close to hitting his 2GB ceiling: His inbox is 90 percent full.

"I get many attachments, and they are sometimes quite large, so having extra storage is a great addition," he said. "I like to not have to delete messages that I may need at a later point, be it an attachment, a memo, or anything else, so this extra storage space only makes things easier for me."

Still, Jupiter's Laszlo warns that the limitless inbox may be a double-edged sword for some users if it creates a vast and disorganized repository of messages. Providers must not only provide tools to search and categorize messages, but also proactively educate people on how to use them, he said.