100MB of Yahoo Mail

My first email address (that I actually used instead of just creating and forgetting about it) was a Yahoo! one about six years ago and believe it or not, I still have it. It’s usefulness disappeared a long time ago since with my current setup, I have full control over everything. The space is only limited by the system’s disks and mutt makes handling the 50MB+ folders and torrents of messages a day a breeze.

I tried to let the Yahoo! account go many times because it kept running out of free space and because I find web-based email too inefficient, but never got around to doing it. This was mainly because I still receive useful messages on it once in a while and it’s used (occasionally) for instant messaging. The forwarding option they used to have a long time ago and an easy way to move my stored messages would have made things a bit simpler, but I guess they really want me to stick around.

Now Yahoo! has upgraded the mailbox size to 100MB, probably in response to Google’s 1GB GMail, killing any chance of moving away for another couple of years. I can predict what will happen now. I’ll still keep the account, letting new messages come through. Soon the mailbox will grow to a few dozen megabytes, making it even more difficult to get the old messages off. This is one of the reasons I’ll be hesitant to seriously use Gmail.