My first email id - the very first one I created when I was introduced to the Internet - was a Yahoo mail id. I still remember my mail box had a measly 5 MB storage limit. At that time, Yahoo was the most popular web portal around and also the dominant search engine. Then Google came along and the rest as they say is history.
With Google starting Gmail and providing a humongous 2GB and counting mail storage for each of its users, it as much as literally pulled the rug from under the feet of most heavy weights including Yahoo. While currently Yahoo has reportedly 250 million email users, and is still the leader in size in relation to Google's 50 million, it has to be noted that Gmail was able to get so many users in a significantly short time, that too when it was in the beta stage. And the number of people switching to Gmail is increasing at a rapid rate.
Yahoo eventually did hike the storage limit to 1 GB for all its free users with the paid users getting 2 GB of storage but its email interface couldn't hold a candle to the Gmail interface which most users fell in love with.
I myself switched to Gmail because I found it much more convenient to go through my mail as they were presented in the form of a conversation. And the tagging of mails was a real boon to sort ones mail. Over and above that, Gmail provides free POP3 access which is a paid feature in Yahoo mail.
Yahoo has made a number of mistakes which has helped Google usurp its position and become the leader in search and advertising and a strong competitor in mail and a few other domains.
Now it seems Yahoo is slowly waking up to the ground realities. The latest news is that it has decided to provide unlimited storage space for its mail users which I whole heartedly welcome.
Unlimited as in infinite. You can store any number of elephants if you can some how convert the elephants to its equivalent bytes ;-) .
One thing worth noting is that Yahoo doesn't allow you to convert its mail box into a virtual drive such as is possible with Gmail. Not yet anyway. While Google doesn't say that it allows one to use ones Gmail box as a virtual drive, there are projects such as the xmail hard drive and Gmail drive which makes it easy to use the email id to store your files in Gmail.
And then, Yahoo Mail servers are reportedly being powered by FreeBSD where as Gmail servers use Linux as their OS. I need not tell you which email service will be favored by a person maintaining a Linux blog ;-).
