Yahoo Mail: Will People Make the Switch?

Yahoo just got refreshed.

Thanks to my Waterloo friends who landed internships at Yahoo, I noticed the new quirky logo.

After Verizon acquired Yahoo in 2017, the company went through many changes behinds the scenes. Along with the logo update, the company recently also launched its all-new Yahoo Mail app.

Yes, Yahoo Mail is back with bells & whistles. It'll allow users to customize look, set custom sound alerts, unsubscribe emails in one tap, and many other things.

But there is something even more interesting here.

Do you know what's the #1 email client today?

It's Gmail. Yes, Google totally dominates the consumer email market with 1.5 Billion users worldwide.

How did Gmail get here?

By providing more storage.

In the early 2000s, all the free email services offered up to 4 megabytes of storage.

"What that meant was you had to delete, delete, delete all the time or your storage would be full. And then if you received an important email, it was bounced back." - CNBC

Gmail solved this problem by offering 1 GB of free storage. At that time, this meant that you would never have to worry about deleting emails again.

It was revolutionary and became the reason for Gmail's popularity.

Today, a decade later, most of the users are quickly reaching their 15 GB storage limit, which is shared between Gmail, Google Drive and Photos. Soon, users would need a paid subscription of Google One to keep everything on the cloud.

And, Yahoo knew this. They're leveraging this fact by offering 1000 GB of free storage with Yahoo Mail.

"You'll never have to delete memories to get your mail again" - Yahoo

The app will also allow users to organize their Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo mailboxes all in one app. Like Dropbox's strategy, when you can't beat competitors, build a platform for them.

Yahoo Mail is an interesting entrant in the market. It'll force Google to rethink the Google One subscription.

Maybe Google will change its storage limit too. If not, will people make the switch for free storage?

When I read about the launch of Yahoo Mail, I thought to myself - who needs another email service. Then, I noticed I've used up 90% of my free storage with Google.

I think I'll need one soon.