Slashdot Mirror
Rediff Joins The 1GB Webmail Club
BGT writes "Gmail has for sure caused a furor by offering announcing 1 GB of space for free. But they are still in the beta stage and you cannot sign up for an account yet. Now India-based Rediff claims to be the first to actually start offering 1GB of space for free, with their Rediffmail service." (Spymac mail users might disagree with the "first free gig" claim.) Signing up for a rediffmail account was straightforward; the site has an intelligent add-a-contact interface when you send email to a new address, but lacks the searchability and multiple-label capability of gmail.
It's interesting to see all of these companies upping their e-mail storage space, however, the 1 GB aspect is just the headliner of Google's product.
Google has quite the list of other new features in development including their own take on spam filter technology, and their intelligent sorting among topics. They also their text-based ad model that nobody else has been able to knock off yet. Yahoo has the chance to do so with Overture, but they've yet to connect Overture to Yahoo Mail.
So, even if everybody else in the free e-mail space can pull 1 GB out of their hats to, they still have a lot of work to do to catch up to what Google's working on.
what amazes me is why the VAST MAJORITY of people continue to use hotmail, the crappiest email service ever. with its whopping 2 mb of space, irritating user interface, MS adverts, and many many other annoying features.
most people use it because 'it's good enough' and 'it's what everyone else uses' . well, they would know what a bad service it is if they use something else and have a comparison.
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
I run a mail server. It doesn't take much bandwidth at all. Sure there's 1GB of storage but a very small percentage of the users are going to go anywhere near the limit. E-mail is a very inefficient way to send large files. There's about 20% overhead.
Smaller "mom & pop" shops can compete by offering a unique/catchy domain name.
I offer POP3 and IMAP as well as secured web-access. Google doesn't support those other two without a third party hack.
Google offers a lot but they don't offer anything that nobody else can offer except the domain name. And they don't offer all the possible features people want for an e-mail account.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
One of the biggest reasons that Google's GMail is still more attractive is simply stability.
If you sign up for Spymac mail or Rediffmail you don't have the backing of a major corporation that has an infrastructure in place to support future growth, investors looking for the company to *not* fold, and a dedicated staff just for your data.
Any fly-by-night place can buy a massive hard drive and start offering 1 free GB of mail, but if they run out of cash and fold then what happens to all of your mail in their old system? At least with google there is a pattern of longeviety that seems to ensure your data will be protected for a long while.