Yahoo! plans to offer unlimited email storage as of May 2007, to mark Yahoo! Mail's 10-year anniversary.

"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 facilitate a smooth transition — we know there’s virtually nothing more precious than your inbox."

When Yahoo! Mail launched 10 years ago, users got a whopping 4MB of storage for their entire mailbox. The service upgraded to 100MB in 2004 followed by a jump to 1GB in 2005.

The announcement puts Yahoo! ahead of Google's Gmail, which has long set the standard when it comes on online email storage. Google blew the competition out of the water when it announced its Gmail service on April Fools Day 2004. At first many thought the promise of a 1GB inbox was a prank, considering Hotmail's free service offered 2MB and Yahoo!'s 4MB.

A year later, when Yahoo! Mail increased its inbox capacity to 1GB, Google quickly responded by boosting Gmail to 2GB. Gmail's storage space increases slightly every day and is currently at 2.8GB. Microsoft's Hotmail service currently offers 2GB.

Yahoo! group vice president of engineering David Nakayama, developed RocketMail, one of the world’s first webmail products - which Yahoo! acquired and relaunched as Yahoo! Mail in 1997.

"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!," Nakayama says.

"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."
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