Yahoo mail's storage turns infinity

Yahoo is expected to remove it's 1GB storage limit from it's free email service, by it self, a pretty cool decision. Yet, as a long time Yahoo mail user and a Gmail convert, I think Yahoo missed the point. Although this upgrade would give Yahoo a great competitive advantage over competitors (Gmail has a constantly growing limit, now at 2.8GB and still growing slightly everyday; Hotmail has a limit of 2GB), that would not win me back over to use Yahoo mail as my main email.

Yes, at first I tried Gmail because Yahoo mail at the time has only 6MB, while Gmail has 1GB. But then, I was hooked on to Gmail's simple and fast AJAX based interface. Soon after, Yahoo updated their service to have 1GB storage, and then added an AJAX interface that, frankly, looks better then Gmail's. I considered moving back to Yahoo, which was my first email account, I sure did. Then 2 things bugged me.

First of all, Gmail has a nice notifier that pops up the moment you get new mail, allowing me to give real fast replies, and never worry about forgetting to check my mail. Well, with Yahoo, I sure can fix that with a widget or Yahoo messenger's mail notifier. Not as elegant, yet does the job.

But here's the real pain in the ass: spam. Gmail's spam filter does so good a job that I only see spam about once a month: it is only the graphic based spam that could get pass the filter. Gmail allows me to enjoy email once again. On the other side, Yahoo lets at least 2 spam mail into my inbox everyday. Yahoo even has a fancier name for it's spam filter: "Spam Guard (TM)", yet, it lets the same spam past again and again. I could click the "this is spam" button to train the filter, yet the same identical spam shows up tomorrow, reminding me that the " this is spam" button never works.

Yahoo still doesn't get the point. They add fancier functions time and again, yet the spam filter still doesn't work for me. While Gmail keeps my inbox clean, and also provides the luxury of simple text ads that don't bother me, and tight integration with other Google apps, such as spreadsheets, docs and much more.

Watch the fun Gmail puppet show on YouTube :)