| is Yahoo Mail really in such a bad place that
| they need to outsource their file attachment
| hosting?
I imagine that Yahoo! Mail is similar to Gmail in that there are size limits on the emails that you can send. Your email
with attachments can't be over 20 ~ 25Mb on Gmail. I think that Hotmail's limit is around 10MB. Partnering with Dropbox would allow one to use their Dropbox space for much larger files.
| When I'm using outlook, I click on a file once
| and it downloads, simple as that, I don't want
| to have to screw around signing up for yet another
| service just to use it.
Dropbox allows you to share files publicly, IIRC. They could take this a couple of ways:
- When attaching, the user could be presented with a dialog that allows them to select files already in their Dropbox account. Therefore if you wanted to upload a file, you could drop it into your Dropbox folder, then compose an email.
- When attaching, the user uploads the file to their Dropbox account via the Yahoo! Mail web interface.
Both of these ways will probably create a URL to the file on Dropbox (publicly accessible, private with password, obfuscated single-use URL, etc).
[ Also, we're talking about webmail clients like Yahoo/Gmail/Hotmail. It really seems like you're comparing them to Outlook+Exchange, which is something completely different. ]