As a Yahoo Mail Beta business user, I was paying $20 a year and still only getting 2.0 GB of storage space (normal users were getting 1 GB).  With my e-mail account filled 77%, I was beginning to look for other options, but thankfully Yahoo has stepped in (by chance) and solved that problem.

Yahoo, the largest email provider online, has just announced that its accounts will soon (rumor is May 2007) have unlimited email storage, which puts them ahead of GMail (2.8 GB) and Microsoft’s Live.com (2 GB) in that category.

I was wondering when Yahoo would upgrade the accounts, but the unlimited deal is really surprising to me.  For a company that loves to charge premium users, they are really undercutting their own services.  The only difference which will remain between me as a business plan user and the regular, free accounts will be a few features which many people don’t even need.  One of the main reasons why I paid for the business plan was to increase my storage (I didn’t want to move email providers just because of that).

Yahoo did mention that they will have a policy against use of the account as an online storage account, which seems to be a pre-emptive strike on those who would use it to store photos, mp3’s and so on.

On the negative side, I still find Yahoo Mail beta to have a very weak search function, lacking in “tagging” ability (which email services like GMail and social networks are all using), and encounter sending errors from time to time…hopefully the Yahoo team will work on these issues.

Additionally, I get frustrated when I’m paying for a service and keep getting captcha’s to solve.  Why would a spammer be paying to use Yahoo mail when he can just use it for free? It just doesn’t make sense to waste the time of your best users - the ones who pay.