Free Yahoo! e-mail to expand to 100MB storage - The China Post

Updated Thursday, June 17, 2004 0:00 am TWN, John Nowland, Special to The China Post


Yahoo! Taiwan Inc announced on Tuesday that its free e-mail accounts will be upgraded to 100MB of storage capacity by October this year. Paying members will also see their storage capacity upgraded to 2GB.
With Google announcing its plan in April to begin offering free 1GB G-mail services in the near future, Yahoo! jumped into action this week upgrading its free e-mail accounts in the U.S. to 100MB of storage capacity. However, the free e-mail service upgrade will not officially arrive in Taiwan until October.
Fee-paying Yahoo! e-mail users who currently have a range of storage options — 25MB, 50MB and 100MB — will all have their storage capacity upgraded to 2GB. The annual fee for this service in Taiwan is expected to be NT$1,200.
The upgrade also means that Yahoo! e-mail users can now receive files up to 10MB in size.
“With the new Yahoo! Mail, consumers won’t have to think about mailbox size. When they judge Web mail value, they’ll continue to look at all the things that make Yahoo! Mail No. 1 — including privacy practices, superior spam and virus protection, and integrated calendaring and alerts,” stated Brad Garlinghouse, vice president of Communications Products at Yahoo! Inc on the company’s Web site.
In response to Yahoo!’s move, other local portal and e-mail providers such as PC Home, Yam.com and Mail2000 reported that they have no current plans to follow Yahoo!’s lead in upgrading their e-mail storage capacities.
However, while the free storage capacity upgrade to Yahoo! e-mail accounts was widely praised by users in the U.S., it was not without its problems.
The launch of the upgrade just happened to coincide with a large-scale cyber-attack on the Web sites of Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft and Apple on Tuesday, meaning that Yahoo! users eager to try out their new storage capacity had to wait until the evening before e-mail services were back to normal.
California-based Internet evaluation company Keynote Systems explained that the attacks on Yahoo! and other prominent Web sites meant delays of around two hours in accessing the sites for most users.
For local Yahoo! users who can’t wait until October to receive their upgraded storage capacity, local news agencies reported yesterday that Yahoo!’s Taiwan users can access their 100MB of e-mail storage capacity immediately by logging on through the my.yahoo.com site and changing their membership account language to “English-United States” or “Chinese-U.S. & Other."
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