Have You Noticed Your Yahoo! Mail Has Been Downgraded?

I have two Yahoo! Mail accounts that I log in to a few times a month just to “keep them alive” so they don’t auto-delete themselves.

I had to reconfigure one of the accounts and noticed something as shown by the screenshot above.

Only 1TB of storage.

If you’re thinking, “Isn’t that good?” No, because all accounts used to have unlimited storage. 1TB is actually a downgrade.

As far as I’m aware, the largest email attachment has a maximum limit of 30MB for most systems. If you had a ridiculous amount of emails that had 30MB each of attachments in them, say 5,000, that only amounts to 0.14TB.

However, here’s the rub. For Y! to downgrade their email service down to 1TB maximum per account, that means as unlikely as this sounds, there must have been a small handful of users that did in fact have more than 1TB of mail…

…and that’s insane to think one could in fact have that much data in a single email account.

This is not one of those things where you say, “Oh, I remember when 1GB was a lot…” because that refers to hardware. We’re talking about emails here. And most emails don’t have binary attachments and don’t approach anywhere near 1MB, never mind 1GB.

To put this in perspective, I have emails archived all the way back to 2000 (yes, really), which presently totals at a little over 33,000 emails including sent mail. My entire Mozilla Thunderbird profile isn’t even 5GB. In fact, it’s just a tick over 4.5GB. And that includes all the add-ons/plugins I use in addition to the mail databases which include all attachments.

But I guess there are, or should I say were, a few Y! Mail users that tapped over 1TB worth of mail in a single account.

What’s the total size of all your emails? Have you ever seen anyone approach 1TB worth of mail for just a single user?