Blane
1
INTERNET giant Yahoo! has upped the ante on rival Google, by boosting the storage space in its free e-mail service from the current maximum of six megabytes to 100 megabytes.
The California-based Internet portal informed its customers about its e-mail service upgrade, which would allow them to store about 50,000 pages of e-mails, on Wednesday.
Yahoo! also has a carrot for users of its premium e-mail service, currently not offered in Singapore. For US$19.99 (S$34) a year, they will now get two gigabytes of storage - the biggest e-mail storage capacity in the industry. There is an added bonus: There will be no graphic-heavy ads for those who choose this bumped-up service.
Yahoo! made the announcement two months after leading search engine Google made public its plans to launch Gmail, a free e-mail service providing one gigabyte - or storage for 500,000 pages of messages.
This is 250 to 500 times more storage space than market leaders like Microsoft's Hotmail service, and still 10 times the new offering from Yahoo!.
The catch was that Google's computers would scan e-mail content electronically and deliver targeted advertisements along with their customers' incoming messages.
Critics slammed the move as an invasion of users' online privacy. They also raised concerns that Google's high-tech devices would wade through e-mails more intensively than filters used widely to weed out potential viruses and spam mail.
Mr Niren Hiro, Yahoo!'s general manager for South-east Asia, promised that its improved e-mail service would not deliver targeted advertisements like Google's. 'Yahoo!'s practice is not to use the content of messages stored in users' Yahoo! mail accounts for marketing purposes.'
In Singapore, heavy-duty e-mail users like Temasek Polytechnic student Stacy Wong, 18, hailed Yahoo!'s upgraded service.
'Of course, it's good for us because we can store more mail, especially those with pictures because they have larger file sizes,' she quipped.
But for Ms Dag Lok, 22, Yahoo!'s latest offer is not especially attractive. The cable sports TV channel intern is more concerned about the amount of spam she gets in the form of pop-up advertisements she received while using Yahoo!'s free e-mail service.
The California-based Internet portal informed its customers about its e-mail service upgrade, which would allow them to store about 50,000 pages of e-mails, on Wednesday.
Yahoo! also has a carrot for users of its premium e-mail service, currently not offered in Singapore. For US$19.99 (S$34) a year, they will now get two gigabytes of storage - the biggest e-mail storage capacity in the industry. There is an added bonus: There will be no graphic-heavy ads for those who choose this bumped-up service.
Yahoo! made the announcement two months after leading search engine Google made public its plans to launch Gmail, a free e-mail service providing one gigabyte - or storage for 500,000 pages of messages.
This is 250 to 500 times more storage space than market leaders like Microsoft's Hotmail service, and still 10 times the new offering from Yahoo!.
The catch was that Google's computers would scan e-mail content electronically and deliver targeted advertisements along with their customers' incoming messages.
Critics slammed the move as an invasion of users' online privacy. They also raised concerns that Google's high-tech devices would wade through e-mails more intensively than filters used widely to weed out potential viruses and spam mail.
Mr Niren Hiro, Yahoo!'s general manager for South-east Asia, promised that its improved e-mail service would not deliver targeted advertisements like Google's. 'Yahoo!'s practice is not to use the content of messages stored in users' Yahoo! mail accounts for marketing purposes.'
In Singapore, heavy-duty e-mail users like Temasek Polytechnic student Stacy Wong, 18, hailed Yahoo!'s upgraded service.
'Of course, it's good for us because we can store more mail, especially those with pictures because they have larger file sizes,' she quipped.
But for Ms Dag Lok, 22, Yahoo!'s latest offer is not especially attractive. The cable sports TV channel intern is more concerned about the amount of spam she gets in the form of pop-up advertisements she received while using Yahoo!'s free e-mail service.