mailbox-war

Yahoo mail has 40 million users. The mailbox limit is 100 MB, so there must be 4 million GB storage space at Yahoo. Even if the mails are stored compressed there must be at least 1 million GB available to store all those e-mails. And there’s even more: deleted mails (the trash) do not count on the quota limit.
Hotmail also expanded the mailbox size to 250 MB...
And all of that for free.
Free??? Millions of dollars invested in harddisks without any profit?
We will certainly pay the price for that... but how?
At least Google is honest: gmail will offer the 1 GB mailbox in return of spying the mail content and displaying corresponding ads...

not all the users max out their accounts so the space is a little smaller, but its still huge, but its not wasted money on their part, some people do upgrade their account for more space causing them to have to pay yahoo and hotmail (don't really understand why someone wouldn't just sign up for another free acount but some do pay for extra storage), also they run ads before, during, and after you logon, much like the way gmail is going to, also, this is just a guess so I dont know if this last part is true, but Im guessing yahoo and MSN doesnt own the HDD that all of this is stored on, but some other company that is leasing it to them, saving them money but still costing them a lot of money. You have a good point of asking if its really worth it, and even after all the ads and users paying for more storage it still seems a little lopsided, but they've been around for awhile so something must be working somehow. (sorry for the long post but I've been up for about 20 hours and I have about 20 more before I can sleep again so I needed to get away from just reading and type something for a little while, I just hope all this make sense later after I've had some rest hehe)

Also, with NAS/SANs kicking-in at the TB level, it's not all that hard to amass a crapload of space for this kinda investment

Trust me, they are making money out of it all.
Besides go to the yahoo email page, and you will see "powered by hp" I am sure they are getting some deal where they get their hardware either really cheap, at cost or perhaps even free.
Also the internet is an area which continues to be integrated with our daily lives. Even if they cut a bit of a loss on the email, it is worth it for them to have market share and customer loyalty.
Also technology to run websites is just increasing and effectively becoming cheaper per gigabyte of storage and data transfer.

My point is that no matter what the price is, there’s no such thing as "free". If yahoo is powered by hp then the hp product prices are powered by this deal. So when you buy a hp product you indirectly sponsor yahoo mail. And regarding the overall costs, isn’t it cheaper to buy something else than hp (but with the same performances) and subscribe to a real mail service?
And what about the increase in junk mail traffic? Having huge mailboxes and the possibility of sending mails of size up to 10 MB, yahoo users will flood the net with all sort of crap...

My point is that no matter what the price is, there’s no such thing as "free". If yahoo is powered by hp then the hp product prices are powered by this deal. So when you buy a hp product you indirectly sponsor yahoo mail.

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I guess so, the computer I am using now is a HP. So in an indirect way Im probably paying for yahoo email, well not me exactly, since I didnt buy it.
And everytime I see a movie, again, money to yahoo, cause they are big on movie advertising.

So instead of "Powered by hp" yahoo should display "Powered by hp users"?

probably powered by big business as well.
Actually I dont mind HP, the only brand i dont like much is IBM.

Probably powered mostly by big businesses but that's just my guess

Google made 6 billion dollars last year. Maybe they just couldn't think of ways to spend all that money, so they decided to buy really expensive hardware for all the email.

Actually I dont know what google uses now, a year or so, their site used around 10,000 servers to run. But there was an interesting site somewhere which showed the servers they used back in the humble days of their beginnings from a computer lab. If i find that, Ill post it here.

Anyway, extending the free mail services mailboxes seems to be absurd. These free mailboxes supposed to be used by those who accidentally use the internet and don’t have much mails to send and receive. A large mail-traffic is usually needed for companies, but they have a designated mail-server for that. And for file-transfer there is a better solution: ftp-transfer. So why increasing the size of free mailboxes? Just for assuring that all bulk e-mails reach the addressees?

So why increasing the size of free mailboxes?

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