Malik  (6/15/04)

Give and Take With Yahoo

Yahoo, taking a hint from the massive appeal of the purposed G-Mail from Google, has bumped up the size of their email accounts, effective today.  Yahoo, in a bid to keep the love and affection of the populace has boosted their inbox size from 4 or 6 megs (newer account had a smaller size than the older accounts) up to a much more impressive 100 megs.  This, in itself, is a definite improvements considering how larger memory is coming at a far cheaper price in today's world than it was when Yahoo's mail service was started...although I will never understand the drop from 6 to 4 megs...

At the same time, Yahoo decided to take a lot of their email addresses that have simply not been used for years and free them up for new members to register.  This, much like the increase in size, is a definite draw to bring in new customers.

All of this, by itself is showing that Yahoo is definitely in the right mindset to stay competitive in today's email market, but I've noticed a new flaw that reminds me of Hotmail's worst feature...and no, it is not their pathetic 2 meg inbox...which is pretty damned lame considering the competition and that this is from the supposed leaders of what is cutting edge; Microsoft.  The flaw is that it seems that the bandwidth has been knocked down a peg as the inbox size was pushed forward.  Considering I use my Yahoo email for standard daily communications (I can't check the Geek-Asylum.com email from work since my work computers are just not technologically savvy enough to handle outlook...yes, I work in that amazing of a workplace...so Yahoo would normally fit this requirement), a major drop in connection speed and ease of use is a bad thing...a very bad thing.  I don't think I'm alone in noticing this flaw...in fact I know I'm not alone as I watched several coworkers face the same dilemma.  It took me a whopping full minute to open a single email (imagine how I felt when I found it was just a damned email virus and realized I should have spent far less time discovering that crap) after the initial 2 minutes to log in.  I don't have that much time to kill that I can waste 20 minutes to check all my emails and to erase all those wonderful porn offers...

Seriously, if Yahoo wants to stay competitive, the offer of larger inboxes with worse service is not going to get them far.  I stopped caring about my Hotmail account because it took to long to check my email, not because of the small inbox...well, not just because of the small inbox.

Malik