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Yahoo Mail promises infinite bits
I've written about "the age of infinite bits," and here's an explicit example.
Today's Wall Street Journal contains an article (reg. required) about Yahoo's new "unlimited" e-mail storage.
From "Web-Based Services Give Email Users A Taste of the Infinite":
One of the ironies of the current tech scene is that the free email services available from the big Web companies are often faster and have more storage than the corporate accounts that office stiffs use in their jobs every day. It's thus now common for people to forward work email to an outside free account, turning it into a permanent archive that's always available for quick searching.
After a year or two of this, it's easy to run into situations like mine where a Yahoo email account has more than 40,000 messages in it.
Dang those internal IT departments that don't let you accumulate 40,000 e-mails!
Seriously, it's easier to get stuff done if you don't use the inbox as your filing system, calendar, todo list, address book, and scrapbook. Read Bit Literacy to see how to keep an empty inbox.
(Don't get me wrong - external accounts like Yahoo Mail and Gmail can be very helpful, even as storage spaces for large backup files. I just don't think a crammed 40,000-message inbox is good as a replacement, or add-on, for the primary inbox.)
(Thanks, Phil)
Having a personal webmail account is useful, convenient, and backed-up. Having a business webmail account often looks unprofessional but would be handy for the ease of access. Now, we can have both. Seems to me that we may be moving closer toe the central server again.
The unintended consequence of having all of that data accumulated in one place - what happens when you want to change?
I don't use any of the free online email services extensively, but in fairness I want to point out that the quote you gave us said the author had 40,000 emails in his Yahoo account, not his Yahoo inbox. Very different. I primarily use Outlook for my personal email, and I clean my inbox out frequently throughout the day, mostly by deleting stuff. But I also keep a lot of emails for reference purposes, properly filed in a whole series of appropriately named and organized folders - NOT in the inbox. I also use the free Outlook add-on Lookout to make it even easier to search for info I need in my filed emails.
So, your point is well taken, but I'm not ready to criticize the author of the article just on the basis of that one quote.
I'm fairly sure he said "email account" rather than "inbox". Is it okay to save old emails?
I have to concur with the last two comments. My inbox is almost empty. But I've been using Gmail since 2004. Just the other day an old client of mine needed some information which was sent to me literally three years ago. Instead of deleting it permanently, gmail of course encourages archiving info instead. Typing in a few keywords let me retrieve the important information. If this was Outlook, that info would have been long gone.
As for switching to another service, it is true that it would be annoyingly difficult to retrieve my thousands of emails over the years that was not spam. But that is true of switching any email service, not just these excessive storage services.
I'm now using Gmail's corporate service for our office email so that we can natively use an @domainname.com email address.
Another point that you didn't cover was the liability of forwarding that mail outside the corporate environment.
Keeping corporate mail in a public repository and not deleting it in a controlled fashion could have severe consequences if opposing lawyers discover it exists, especially when it should have been deleted as part of a records retention program.
My Yahoo mail [since 1994] has accumulated MANY more than 40k messages. Some [a lot, actually] are carefully filed in organized folders; many are just in the incoming queue order.
It's not a problem.
A fireproof, searchable, quasi-eternal and unlimited file retention system.
Not only not a problem, it's great.
peterNaCl