By now everyone knows gmail, it’s practically become a verb, just like google. Yahoo then, not wanting to trail too far behind, has stepped up its efforts to polish off its webmail offering to match gmail. gmail offers 2.7gb of storage space, yahoomail gives you 1gb, either way it’s much more than anyone will ever need. Of course, yahoomail has been around for a very long time, it long outlives gmail. And it has received periodic updates and improvements over time, but the new yahoomail beta is supposed to rival gmail – big headlines, big launch, big news.

My software engineering books would always mention “the zero solution”. Before you start building a new system, you have to compare its cost and projected benefit against the current system. What will be the benefit of the new system compared to doing nothing at all? This is how you would determine whether the project has any kind of potential at all. In that spirit, let’s spare a thought for the soon-to-be-extinct old yahoomail, the existing solution.

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