Yahoo Mail looks set to celebrate its tenth birthday by offering unlimited storage space to all of its users.
According to a blog posting, Yahoo is going to offer an infinite amount of web space for emailers to store their correspondence from May.
"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," said John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail.
Rival Google has offered surfers with GMail and GoogleMail accounts more than 2GB of storage space since it was launched, though Yahoo only offered 1GB - until now.
David Nakayama, group vice president of engineering at Yahoo Mail and the developer of RocketMail, one of the world's first webmail applications, said: "Our total capacity for mail accounts back [in 1997] was 200GB for all of our customers. At Yahoo, we're now receiving more inbound mail than that every 10 minutes."
Not all Yahoo Mail customers will benefit from the increased capacity immediately - the company plans to roll out it steadily in case any teething problems are encountered.
"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," said Kremer.
Yahoo has taken the same precautions with other features that it has added to Yahoo Mail recently, such as when it introduced instant messaging functionality into the interface.
Rival webmail service, Hotmail, also recently celebrated its tenth anniversary.
http://mail.yahoo.com/