Yahoo! storage goes negative

Some stumbles in email upgrade

By John Oates • Get more from this author

Posted in Bootnotes, 15th June 2004 14:00 GMT

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Yahoo!'s announcement that it was increasing storage limits for its email service should have been good news all round. But some Register readers got a rather strange email when they logged into Yahoo! this morning.

"You are currently exceeding your Yahoo! Mail storage quota by a very large amount. You are only allowed -2048.0MB of storage but you are currently using 0.4MB of storage. Your account has been temporarily disabled from receiving new messages."

One reader wrote: "I received an email this morning stating that my Yahoo! mailbox was over the limit. In fact, I was using 0mb of my -2048mb of storage (as stated, I'm not making it up). Apparently, I need to retroactively delete a whole lot of mail to get under the limit. Perhaps they are planning to store someone else's email on my hard drive. Looks like they may be having a few kinks in the rollout. I am a Mail Plus user and pay for the service as part of my DSL bundle.

Is this an alarming new model for email - "We give you email, you give us storage space"?

Others were less lucky - several readers complained they were unable to get into their email accounts at all.

Finally, one reader provides an answer to anyone with email troubles. He recommends a service which offers free unlimited storage space and no adverts or mail readers. So any readers with decent Russian should get over to www.mail.ru ®