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Bigger Space for Web-Based Mail

Posted on: Thursday, 1 July 2004, 06:00 CDT

GOOGLE Inc's announcement about its Web-based mail service in April was no April Fool's joke: it was planning on offering one gigabyte storage space for a free service.

When it was announced, I had six megabytes of storage for my Yahoo! Mail, 2MB of storage for my Hotmail account, and 10MB of storage for my TIMEnet Mail account.

A total of 18MB e-mail capacity seems puny when compared to what Gmail was offering.

I remember my first Web mail account. It was Yahoo! Mail, offering 4MB of storage space. That was almost seven years ago when 4MB was enough for my computing requirements. Today, it's barely enough for the digital photographs, news and updates that I get, and I usually get low storage warning for each of my accounts.

A check on the Web with various free Web-based e-mail providers showed that 10MB seemed to be the maximum storage capacity, unless you subscribe to premium services.

Now Google hasn't launched its Gmail service yet; it's only available for testing for a few selected people on a per invitation basis. Nevertheless, you don't have to wait for Gmail to be officially launched nor subscribe for premium services to start enjoying more storage space for your e-mails.

A pleasant surprise awaited me recently when I logged into my Yahoo! Mail account. Instead of the usual 10 per cent available storage space, I saw 90 per cent available space. Yahoo! Mail had increased my storage capacity from 6MB to 100MB of space.

Then MSN Hotmail announced that it will increase the Hotmail Inbox storage space to 250MB in multiple markets, with worldwide rollout expected later in the summer.

Since Yahoo! offered 100MB of e-mail storage space, I haven't deleted a message and it will be some time before I need to start worrying about deleting messages. Also, digital photographs from friends and family can be e-mailed to me and I can ask for information to be sent to my Yahoo! Mail account and not to worry if there's enough space, for now.

However, it isn't just about storage space.

According to a Google's Press release, Gmail is based on the idea that "users should never have to file or delete a message, or struggle to find an e-mail they've sent or receive".

Apart from the 1GB storage space, Gmail will also include Google's search technology, so users can quickly search any e-mail message in their account.

Gmail will also eliminate the need to file messages into a folder. Instead, messages are organised into folders and "conversation" that "shows messages in the context of all the replies sent in response to them".

A larger inbox is only part of the enhancements that both these Web- based services announced.

According to Press reports, among its enhancements, Yahoo! will have an easier-to-use design, an increased message attachment, faster search and easier manageability and the release of more than 50 million Yahoo! IDs.

On the other hand, starting this month, MSN Hotmail will roll out free e-mail anti-virus protection and provides several levels of enhanced filtering, enabling users to set the spam control level.

To me, this is a good example of competition and choice. And as a user, all I know is that I'm enjoying the increased space and the choices that I have for a Web-based e-mail service.

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