Yahoo! Mail Blog
The latest scoop on Yahoo! Mail product updates, new releases, bug fixes,

At the Yahoo! Open Hack Day we did a prerelease of the Yahoo! Mail Web Service. It was a tremendous success, drawing four teams of hackers who worked late into the night through the early morning to build some terrific hacks. Today we’re announcing the official release of the web service.

What exactly does this mean? As a developer, it means open access to a platform with 250 million users. Right out of the box you’ll have a potential user base that’s larger than Windows Live Hotmail, AOL Mail and Gmail. As a user, it means new and interesting ways of accessing your Yahoo! Mail account. To get a better idea of what kinds of applications you can expect, keep your eye on the Yahoo! Mail Application Gallery. The gallery will fill up with more applications over time, however we’ve already got a great collection of Open Hack Day applications as well as employee contributed applications.

The web service has two tiers of access: one for free accounts and another for premium accounts (broadband partner accounts and Yahoo! Mail Plus accounts). Free users will be able to access mail preview information, your list of folders and a list of messages in each folder, for instance. Premium users will have full access to the web service, including the ability to read, send, save and search messages. As an added incentive for developers, we have a new affiliate program with Commission Junction. For every user you upsell to Yahoo! Mail Plus, Yahoo! will give you $10.

More details regarding both the webservice and the affiliate program can be found on the Yahoo! Developer Network. If you’re looking to interact with Yahoo! engineers and external developers, we’ve set up a Yahoo! Group.

So fire up your code editors and show us what you’ve got!

Ryan Kennedy
Yahoo! Mail Web Service Engineer
Yahoo! Mail Evangelist

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I know, I’m a bad evangelist. I didn’t post about our unlimited storage announcement here yesterday. I promise, I have a good excuse. I’m down at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference in San Diego. Anyway, if you didn’t see the announcement, head over to Yodel Anecdotal, our corporate blog, and have a look at the news.

Ryan Kennedy
Yahoo! Mail Evangelist

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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

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Do you send a lot of attachments with your email? Then here’s a quick tip that I know you’ll like. When you need to add an attachment (photos, documents, etc.) to an email message while using Yahoo! Mail Beta, do you normally add the attachment as the last step? For example, you write the whole message and then you add the attachment.

Well, why don’t you give this a try…
Try doing it the complete opposite way. Upload your attachments first before you write your message. Then, after you’re done attaching, write your email. Try it this way just once, and you’ll never go back to the old way.

Happy emailing!
Andrew – Yahoo! Mail Beta Team

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Managing your contact addresses couldn’t be easier in Yahoo! Mail Beta. But the one thing that might be a little confusing is that we no longer call it the Address book. All of your saved email addresses and contact information are conveniently located in the left column of the Mailbox window in the item called “Contacts”.

The thing to remember is that now you can manage your whole contact list (formerly known as the Address book) right from the comfort of your Yahoo! Mail Beta window. Adding, deleting, creating contact lists, editing lists and emailing contacts can all be done with a click of a mouse button.

Quick tip of the week
And now for your favorite feature… Andrew’s quick tip. Did you know that, if you right click on a name in your inbox, there is a menu option on the shortcut menu that appears (it’s down towards the bottom) labeled “Add Sender to Contacts”. If you click that menu item you can add that name and contact information right to your contact list. How’s that for easy.

Happy emailing!!
Andrew – Yahoo! Mail Beta Team

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Yahoo!’s charity of the month for March is Comic Relief – Red Nose Day 2007, “The Big One”. As you can see, we in Yahoo! Mail are going big, getting into the spirit of the thing. We’ve even given Liam a big red conk and just trying to get the word out.

So here’s another plug for Red Nose Day, next Friday March 16th. See how you can get involved on the Red Nose Day site and watch the funny Ricky Gervais clip on the Yahoo! For Good pages.

Speaking of office activities, we’re hoping to see our boss George turn up to work dressed as a goose or something. What will you do to get involved?

Jonathan – Yahoo! Mail Beta Team

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