‘… consider a “temporary, anonymous, free, secure, disposable” but also fake email address. Somewhat like the throwaway burner phones you read about in spy novels.’
THE notice the other week from Yahoo Mail was cool and clinical, even if I found its content dramatic. Once boasting of a whopping 1 terabyte (or 1,000 gigabytes) of free email storage, the Internet pioneer said it was “updating storage limits, offering 20GB of free storage for basic accounts and flexible options for more space as needed.”
The update is actually a 98 percent downgrade! Imagine your power bank, with a rating of 10,000 mAH, downsizing to 200 mAH. But the comparison ends there. You or somebody paid for your power bank. Yahoo Mail has never charged you for email for the past 27 years.
While the 1TB-to-20GB drop is steep, the Yahoo update will not happen tomorrow, although the notice says “sometime soon.” Meanwhile, here are some coping tips.
• 20GB is still larger than its rival brands which provide 15GB to free accounts. Gmail, for one, never reduced storage. In fact it increased its limit from 1GB during its launch in 2004, and gradually four times until settling at its current limit 12 years ago.
Yahoo Mail has been around longer when it began in 1997 with a mere 4MB. At that time, the leader was Hotmail, with 2MB! Yahoo increased to 100MB in 2004 and 1GB the next year. In 2007, the company promised unlimited storage. At that time, company co-founder David Filo was quoted as saying, “We are giving them [users] no reason to ever have to delete old e-mails,” promising that “you can keep stuff forever.” But such boldness was tempered in 2013, when “unli” became 1TB. Nevertheless, 1,000GB still seemed like the sky was the limit.
Yahoo’s recent decision is in keeping with current industry practice of offering a decent 15GB free and selling additional storage. At 20GB, Yahoo can still rightfully claim that their offer is “industry leading.” Free-email providers have simply redefined the meaning of free.
• 15GB or 20GB is a lot of space for emails. An email the length of this column will not exceed 10KB, without attachments. See for yourself using an email size calculator. 15GB will be good for at least 1.5 million page-long, single-spaced emails, and 20GB can accommodate 2 million messages.
• The culprit will be file attachments. These can be kept small and to a minimum, or deposited and linked to a cloud storage. But if you are a moderate user, you don’t even have to worry about these.
• Delete spam. It is possible that some of these unsolicited messages find their way to you when they randomly guess your email address. The vast majority of them would be sent by businesses with which you voluntarily but unknowingly left your email. Such things happen when you, for instance, want to use free wi-fi at a shopping mall and you are asked for your email. For this purpose, consider a “temporary, anonymous, free, secure, disposable” but also fake email address. Somewhat like the throwaway burner phones you read about in spy novels.
• Delete really old emails.
• If the extra storage space really matters to your business or your line of work, why not add a few hundred pesos a year or so to your operating expenses? You can charge this as a legitimate business expense or build it in your professional fee.
• There are still at least two other providers of large, free email storage. AOL (America Online), which is owned by the same parent company that owns Yahoo Mail, still offers 1TB. But we can safely predict that it will follow suit, and not for long. Mail.com offers 65 GB.
This discussion is limited to storage size. When comparing a free-email service, review security, uptime, access, privacy, spam protection, and ease of use. Free comes with hidden features, so make sure to read the fine print and read the reviews.
