Today marks a special milestone for Yahoo!. Ten years ago today, Yahoo! Mail was born. It’s hard to imagine that just a decade ago, the idea of free email accessible from anywhere was a novelty.

Think of how far we’ve come since then. Web mail now is one of the most popular ways to stay in touch. It’s brought families closer together, let travelers send regards from the road, and made the concept of change-of-address notices virtually obsolete.

Ten years ago, Yahoo! Mail launched with just 3 megabytes of storage and the only images you were likely to receive were ASCII Art. Today, JPEGs are by far the most popular attachment type in Yahoo! Mail. Ten years ago mobile phones were bulky, expensive luxuries that were basically used for one thing: to make important phone calls. These days, everyone from students to busy parents and grandparents use their cell phones to check email on the go. And ten years ago, many people didn’t “get” Web mail or why they would need an address that wasn’t tethered to their ISP. Now many use it as their primary personal mail address.

Since we’re feeling nostalgic, we’ve put together some email milestones from the last decade:

• October 1997: Yahoo! Mail launches following our acquisition of Four 11, creators of RocketMail.
• December 1998: The movie You’ve Got Mail debuts.
• March 1999: CNN’s Ten Commandments of Email cites that Americans sent 2.1 billion emails daily (vs. 196 billion per day this year).
• December 1999: Yahoo! Mail launches Spamguard to detect spam and banish it to a separate folder.
• January 2000: Web mail survives Y2K.
• November 2001: Pope John Paul II is the first pontiff to send an email apology.
• March 2002: It’s reported internationally that email outpaces snail mail as the preferred method for residential communication.
• December 2003: Congress passes the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 to regulate the sending of commercial email.
• July 2004: Yahoo! acquires Oddpost, bringing AJAX to Yahoo! and inspiring Yahoo! Mail’s most significant upgrade ever.
• June 2005: Broadway’s “Spamalot” wins Tony Award for Best Musical.
• March 2006: IDG study shows that Americans sent 11.8 billion photos via email in 2005, compared with 2.6 billion in 2000. By 2009, this number is projected to 25.7 billion images.
• March 2007: Yahoo! Mail announces free, unlimited e-mail storage for all users.
• August 2007: According to Comscore , the worldwide Web mail market counts approximately 543 million people, with Yahoo! Mail alone representing 255 million.

It’s funny to reflect that when Rocketmail first started, many users chose to list their email addresses in a public directory because they wanted everyone to know how to contact them. Fast-forward to a world where we invest a huge amount of time and diligence protecting our users from spam (now estimated to represent more than 70% of all email) and phishing attacks.

So what about you? We put together a brief survey to find out how your email habits have evolved over the past 10 years. Please share your thoughts with us (or leave them as comments), and we’ll be sure to report back on our findings later this month.

Until then, happy emailing!

John Kremer
Vice President, Yahoo! Mail

My kids, like most, love text messaging. But while their nimble fingers can easily navigate cell phone keypads at lightning speeds, I definitely prefer a full keyboard, and am much more inclined to use email than text messaging.

So I’m doubly excited to announce the launch of the all-new Yahoo! Mail today. Not only are we launching a brand new version of one of the most popular Web mail services in the world, but we’re unveiling a solution to my texting woes, and giving people around the world more ways to connect. With the new Yahoo! Mail, people can send and receive free text messages in their email to and from any mobile phone number in participating markets including the US, Canada, India and the Philippines.

It’s sure to come in handy for people like me who want to keep in touch with text-crazy friends and family. From my Yahoo! Mail window (and using my comfortably full-sized keyboard), I can type a note to my son, letting him know I’m on my way to his soccer practice, and send it straight to his phone. And he can send a text message right back to my email, letting me know where to meet him. The intuitive, chat-like interface makes it super easy, even if you’re a novice at text messaging.

We already have great integrated instant messaging features in Yahoo! Mail, so adding text messaging was a natural next step. It’s an increasingly popular way to keep in touch, especially among younger users. In fact, 69% of US mobile phone users between the ages of 18-39 use text messaging (Harris Interactive, June 2006), and half of Americans age 18-25 say they sent or received a text message over the phone in the past day (Pew Research Center, January 2007).

Today’s news doesn’t stop at text messaging — the all-new Yahoo! Mail also lets users send and receive instant messages in real-time to their friends who are logged into Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger or Windows Live Messenger, without ever leaving the e-mail experience. You can even switch between emailing, instant messaging, and text messaging as your friends come online or go mobile. We want our users to be able to choose how they communicate with their friends and family, in the most appropriate method for the moment. By adding these new types of real-time communication into Yahoo! Mail, we’re laying the foundation for an even more social experience for our users.

For those of you who love the original Yahoo! Mail interface — not to worry. We’re keeping Yahoo! Mail Classic as well. Our goal is to provide the best email experience for everyone, whether that be familiar and comfortable or new and shiny.

To check out the brand new Yahoo! Mail, go on over to http://mail.yahoo.com. Enjoy!

UPDATE: Clarification that the new Yahoo! Mail will be rolled out globally over the next six weeks. You’ll know you have the new version because you’ll no longer see “beta” under the logo and you’ll find some helpful information within the product explaining the new features. If you’re a Classic user, you’ll be invited to try the new mail when it’s available to you.

John Kremer
Vice President, Yahoo! Mail

As promised, we’ve started to roll out unlimited email storage to Yahoo! Mail users worldwide today. When it hits your account, you’ll notice the storage meter has disappeared — meaning, you just don’t have to worry about deleting old messages ever again!

As a reminder, while we wish we could simply flip a switch and “unlimit” everyone at once, we’ll be rolling this out over a few months to facilitate a smooth transition. Thanks for your patience.

Happy emailing!

John Kremer
Vice President, Yahoo! Mail

As Yahoo! Mail approaches its 10-year anniversary, I’m the lucky one who gets to announce that we will begin offering everyone unlimited email storage starting in May 2007. To mark the occasion, I checked in with David Nakayama, our group vice president of engineering, for some perspective on this milestone. In case that name doesn’t ring a bell, he’s the developer of RocketMail, one of the world’s first webmail products, which Yahoo! acquired and relaunched as Yahoo! Mail in 1997.

Dave reminisced: “I remember getting in a room to plan our RocketMail launch over a decade ago and worrying that our original plan of a 2MB quota wasn’t enough, and that we needed to be radical and DOUBLE the storage to 4MB per account! It’s ironic that I routinely send and receive individual mail attachments bigger than that now. Our total capacity for mail accounts back then was 200GB for all of our customers. At Yahoo!, we’re now receiving more inbound mail than that every 10 minutes.”

When Yahoo! Mail launched 10 years ago, users got a whopping 4MB of storage for their entire mailbox. Today, you would fill that up with a single picture from your weekend.

This got me thinking about how the storage capacity of other popular technology products has changed. A quick snapshot:

1997: Yahoo! Mail launches with 4MB of storage

• SanDisk introduces 2MB flash card for the Canon PowerShot.
• Compaq announces “high capacity memory upgrades” in four capacities, including 16MB, 32MB, 64MB and 128MB capacities.
• Caleb introduces the Ultra High Density floppy disk drive that stores up to 144MB on a single disk.
• The first iPod is still a gleam in someone’s eye. It’s not introduced until 2001 and comes with 5GB of storage.

2004/2005: Yahoo! Mail upgrades in 2004 to 100MB of storage, followed by a jump to 1GB in 2005

• Olympus upgrades to 1GB flash memory card.
• HP announces 160GB storage upgrade for its Media Center PCs.
• Corsair in 2005 announces a USB flash drive with 4GB of storage.
• Apple announces the Fifth Generation iPod with 30GB capacity.

2007: Yahoo! Mail announces unlimited email storage

• SanDisk launches 8GB flash card for photo storage.
• Alienware introduces a desktop computer with 1 terabyte of storage.
• Apple currently ships the newest 80GB iPod, launched in 2006 and holds up to 100 hours of video.

We’re psyched to be breaking new ground in the digital storage frontier by giving our users the freedom to never worry about deleting old messages again. And, like any responsible webmail service, we have anti-abuse limits in place to protect our users. BTW: As much as we’d like to just flip a switch and “unlimit” everyone on the same day, we’ll be rolling this out over a few months to facilitate a smooth transition — we know there’s virtually nothing more precious than your inbox.

We hope we’re setting a precedent for the future. Someday, can you imagine a hard drive that you can never fill? Never having to empty your photo card on your camera to get space back? Enough storage to fit the world’s music, and then some, on your iPod? Sounds like a future without limits.

Beats a slice of birthday cake, eh?

John Kremer
Vice President, Yahoo! Mail