alex.moskalyuk

Russian Yandex, the leading search engine for the Russian-speaking part of the world, started offering unlimited mailboxes for the users of Yandex Mail. The interface works only in Russian, which cuts out most of the Internet users.

The size of the e-mail box will remain fixed, according to Yandex. Any time you need the extension, you go into their control panel and add another 20 MB chunk. Not sure why they do this, I guess there’s some kind of tracking involved and prediction algorithm will compile the purchase order for the guy in charge of the hard drives. Also prevents you from abusing the service and sending your Britney Spears MP3 collection to all the users of the service as spam. The max size for the message is 10 MB, that naturally includes the attachments. Write to Elena Kolmanovskaya (klm [at] yandex-team.ru) to ask why no English interface was included, although I have suspicion the might not be prepared for global market and competing with the likes of Google. Currently Yandex Mail has 3 million users.

Which brings up another question - imagine the quantity and quality of spam with Google’s 1 GB and similar offerings through the ripple effect. If you are in the business of selling organ enlargement supplements, and before you were limited to text-only and HTML offerings since Hotmail/YahooMail/MSN/EarthLink would reject anything above the reasonable size not to overload the customer’s inbox, Google’s 1 GB offer allows the spammer to send an MP3 file or even a small MPEG/WMV video that would advertise the product. If the attachment fits the policy (which could be as lineant as 20-25 megs per attachment), then your mailbox could one day become stuffed with all sorts of audio and video and clear text messages telling nothing. The spam filters (at least the current ones) would not cope with them, the users, getting the messages like “Here’s Jim’s party from last Friday”, would probably have no qualms about opening a “safe” WMV file, leading to the new era in spam.