Yahoo to lift cap on e-mail storage

Yahoo Inc. said Tuesday that it planned to offer unlimited e-mail storage to its roughly quarter of a billion users, starting in May.

The world’s biggest e-mail service is scrapping its free e-mail storage limit of 1 gigabyte, or about a billion bytes of data, responding to explosive growth in attachment sizes as people share ever more photos, music and videos.

Microsoft Corp. has a free e-mail storage limit of 2 gigabytes, while Google Inc. caps its Gmail service at 2.8 gigabytes.

By contrast, when Yahoo first introduced its e-mail service a little under a decade ago, it capped individual storage at 4 megabytes per user. At that time, an “ultra high-density” floppy disk for personal computers held 144 megabytes.

“People should think about e-mail as something where they are archiving their lives,” Yahoo co-founder David Filo said.

Starting in May, the changeover to unlimited storage should take a month, said John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company said the offer was for personal use only. Filo said Yahoo was looking “on a case-by-case basis” at lifting caps on storage for other services such as its Flickr photo-sharing service.