Yahoo is expanding its offer of unlimited e-mail storage worldwide today. The unlimited capacity wll roll out to all users over the next few months.

Yahoo announced its unlimited storage plan for U.S. residents back in March. Yahoo Mail originally launched in 1997 with 4MB of storage. The mail app was an outgrowth of Yahoo's acquisition of Four11 Corporation, which owned an app known as RocketMail.

A timeline compiled by Google Operating System shows that Yahoo made no changes to its e-mail app until two months after Google introduced Gmail in April 2004.

Here's a quick comparison of the mailbox sizes offered by various web based email services.

GMail (Google Mail) - 2.5 GB (growing)

Windows Live Hotmail - 2 GB

Yahoo Mail! - 1 GB

Lycos Mail - 3 GB

Rediffmail - Unlimited {popular in India}

The only issue is with the email attachment sizes - Except Lycos which allows email attachments of unlimited size, all other services impose a size restriction which varies anywhere between 10 MB and 16 MB (for AOL).

written by Florin C.