Yahoo! Mail will start giving away unlimited and infinity email storage space beginning May. Currently Yahoo! Mail users only getting 1 gigabytes of mail storage space, while subscribers of Yahoo! Mail Plus can increase the limit to 2 GB. 10 years ago, when Yahoo Mail service was initially launched, the free space given was mere 4 MB in size, which was later increase to 100 megabytes in 2004 in direct competition with GMail which at that point of time offering 1 GB free email storage. A year later, Yahoo further up the space available to 1 GB for free account as for now.

IT Pro (link dead) reported that Yahoo scraps 1GB mail storage limit in anticipation of huge spike of demand when Apple iPhone is launched in US in late June and in UK in October. Yahoo will IMAP-enabled mailboxes for Apple iPhone users. IMAP or IMAP4 (Internet Message Access Protocol) is an application layer Internet protocol that allows a local client to connect, access and sync e-mail on a remote server, with all mail retention at the mail server.

Currently, Google’s Gmail offers around 2.8 GB of free mail storage and increasing every second, albeit at a slow speed. While Windows Live Mail users have 2 gigabytes of space and MSN Hotmail users get 1 GB free. All eyes now is on Gmail coming April 1st, when Gmail was launched exactly 3 years ago. Gmail has a tradition of announcing jaw-dropping news on its anniversary on April Fool Day, and it’s highly speculated that Google may offers some sort of competitive answer to unlimited Yahoo Mail.

As Yahoo Mail has more than 250 million users, the increment transition may takes several months. According to John Kremer, Vice President of Yahoo Mail, “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.”

Although Yahoo Mail now offering a truly “never need to delete any email” mail account, however, it’s still unclear whether users will entice to switch over to it. At least, Yahoo webmail is yet to offer POP3 access and email forwarding for free. Beside, several gigabytes of email space is usually more than enough for majority of users, as email attachment still has maximum limit of 10 MB, other that those who use it as file server or hosting space.

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