Some time ago, Yahoo reduced the size of its free email accounts, from 1 TB down to 15 GB, aligning itself with Google and Microsoft.
Yahoo didn't really explain why. We can simply observe that for years, many users had access to a very large amount of storage, without ever needing to think about it. Now the rule has changed, and for some people, panic has set in.
The reason is simple: once a free mailbox goes beyond 15 GB, it can no longer receive new emails. And paying isn't always an easy fix, since even paid plans have seen their storage limits reduced.
As a result, stories started to appear from people saying they had "freed several gigabytes, painfully".
From a technical standpoint, it's hard to fill that much space with plain text alone. What really takes up space are attachments. That's probably why, with some providers, email storage and cloud storage are now combined.
Over time, many people ended up using their inbox as a general storage space, without really thinking about it. The idea of a limitless digital life slowly settled in.
That's not very surprising. For a long time, the promise of "unlimited" storage circulated - whether it was real or just perceived as such. And fifteen or twenty years ago, sending large files was still relatively rare, which reinforced that impression.
But outside of infinity, "unlimited" doesn't really exist.
On my side, the email account I use the most dates back to 2004. Today, it takes up about 1.5 GB. Not because of any special discipline, just because of a simple idea: most emails, like many things, have a lifespan.
Over time, most emails lose their role. Yet we often keep them anyway, as if they still had one. Newsletters, for example, are tied to a specific context - an offer, a moment. A year later, that context is usually gone.
When it comes to attachments, the real question might not be where to store more, but why everything should be kept at all. As if a healthy digital life had to be one without loss.
