How a good file helped me break free of Yahoo! Mail

In 1997, as the term “dotcom” came to describe a wave of internet start-ups, web portal king Yahoo! acquired a free web email service called RocketMail and launched Yahoo! Mail, a service to compete with Microsoft’s recently acquired Hotmail.

Seven years later, Google would launch Gmail with a gigabyte of free storage, a bold move at the time; Not to be outdone, Yahoo! responded by upping the free storage of its service to a terabyte.

Last year, though, without much explanation and just a few months of notice, Yahoo! changed the free storage limit of its mail service to 20 GB. Yahoo! had long offered Yahoo! Mail Plus.