Slashdot Mirror
Hotmail, Others Follow Gmail's Storage Boost
BobPaul writes "Following behind Yahoo Mail's recent upgrade to 100MB of free storage, and trailing behind GMail's 1GB (last mentioned here), ZDNet reports that Hotmail will soon boost email storage as well. 'The upgrade will increase Hotmail's free e-mail storage limits from 2 megabytes to 250MB and its paid e-mail service, which costs $19.95 a year, from 10MB to 2 gigabytes. The changes will begin in early July.' Another interesting tidbit from the article: 'Ask Jeeves also plans to grant its e-mail subscribers more storage room... According to an e-mail sent to iWon users, Ask Jeeves plans to give each of the sites' e-mail subscribers 125MB of free storage.'"
hurray for competition :)
Solid Splash design
With this extra demand, will it lead to a faster curve towards even cheaper hard disks with even more space on them?
:-)
Time to invest in Seagate?
-- jaf
Trying to save customers, but honestly, with a sleak, sexy UI of GMail, without those SUPER ANNOYING banners. 2GB of free space, or even unlimited wouldn't be enough to bring me over since those HUGE and OBNOXCIOUS banners are still there.
They have to Googleize, and learn that small, relavent banners produce more then spaming me with flashy popups that install spyware, and that Mozilla/GoogleToolbar will block.
But it is a step in the right direction.
To use a remote computer as permanent storage?
I just don't trust a free service provider to care too much about my data.
It took Google to do this. I mean, what were the chances of the incumbents doing this, if Google hadn't?
That's what happens when you sit around and be complacent.
Well done Google! The others are just playing catch-up.
London's finest organic fairtrade coffee
In less than three months since their announcement of Gmail (April 1st) they have redefined what a free email service should provide, in terms of storage and attachment size if nothing else.
If Gmail hadn't appeared to shake up the status quo then Yahoo, Hotmail, etc would still be providing storage in the 2MB region rather than two or three orders of magnitude more.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
The 1gb limit is simply a carrot for us all.
:)
Most normal users won't get anywhere near filling a gMail account for a good long time.
Its used to show the difference between the good and the bad.
Now - when google move into ISP land, with 100mbit broadband i'll be happy
liqbase
The main people who won't switch away from Hotmail are the home users who like Hotmail. If you ask them if they want to try something better, after they complain about spam/not being able to send big attachments/spyware, their response will be "NO, I'M HAPPY...shit, this service has so much spyware..."
And now that Microsoft has disallowed signing up for a Passport with a non-Microsoft email address, tieing these (usually) MSN Messenger using Hotmail to Hotmail, we'll have lots of people locked into it, and they'll bitch, piss and moan at you to help them, then ignore you.
God, I love users who are deluded as to the utter shitness of their email service. Trust me, I know loads of them.
(I'll bet there's not one Hotmail account NOT covered in spam by now. They're all just spam buckets. Evil, evil Hotmail...we hates it my precioussssss...)
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Fortunately, I've snatched up a beta Gmail account and am finding it to be the bee's knees thus far. I've been fed up with Yahoo for a long time. Had I gone with Hotmail I'd have been even more fed up.
For several years I've had to trim all kinds of stuff out of my email archives due to the claustrophobic 4- and 6-meg limit on Yahoo mail. Then suddenly I log in and there's 100 meg available. Well that sucks, I've deleted maybe half that in stuff I'd rather have kept over the years. And it's still Yahoo; they still puke up obnoxious ads every chanse they get, and at the end of every single outgoing message.
On the other hand, since the dot-bomb, most over-the-web services have gotten crippled or disappeared entirely for non-paying users. It's a breath of fresh air to see some things actually improve, regardless Microsoft's and Yahoo's motives for doing so.
If an all but ad-free environment, a clean interface and the other Google niceties become competitive features that many webmail services mimmick, then great, everybody wins, including those unwilling to switch services. But for my money (or lack of it), I'd rather be signed up with an outfit whose mission statement amounts to "don't be evil" rather than "always be evil except to save face".
perhaps you're kidding, i dunno, but these free services do provide a lot. webmail, hosted on someone elses server has more reliable backup/recover procedures. in the 7 years i've used yahoo mail, i've _never_ has a message just disapear. i have had a hard drive crash w/o a backup anywhere in sight. and once i d/l my email from ISP and delete from their server, it makes it more challenging to get to the emails. hotmail/yahoo/gmail whatever is generally accessable anywhere you can get a public ip and out the firewall on port 80. though sometimes it may be more challening from some business who deem necessarry to block the well known webmail sites.
now, personally, i think that while gmail will be enticing (and i'll certainly sign up when given a chance), they'll need to really provide more than email. yahoo's calendar is really nice. it becomes a challenge now to simply forget when the date you officially became a domesticated individual.
GMail *is* better... much much better. it's quite possibly the best UI I've ever seen in a web browser. if you take a few minutes to figure out the shortcut keys, it's better than just about anything else out there. Yes, you can't format mail just yet, but still it is in beta.
it's fast, incredibly intuitive. I'm in love.
the only thing I didn't like was the lack of new mail notification, so I downloaded Pop Goes the GMail (windows only... one downside -- but I doubt its long before something like this comes along for other platforms) and it takes care of that for me.
In short I'm never going back to any other webmail service. It'll take me a lot to pry me away from GMail.
No man is an island, but Gary is a city in Indiana.
Google has pulled off a perfect rope-a-dope scheme, perhaps unintentionally. At first, GMail appears vulnerable since Microsoft and Yahoo could easily match its 1 GB storage. But that's not GMail's real strength. By its competitors raising their storage limits, they are *emphasizing* their own strategic *weaknesses* (no automatic organization, lousy searching), and Google will pummel them in the webmail market with its arsenal of exclusive advantages.
Google move was to give not only a big enough (?) space for mail, but also a interface to effectively deal with it, and...well, google to search within.
Is like those pills that have "the vitamin C of 40 lemons" or something similar, you can handle that in that way, will feel like a pill but will have the amount you need, but if a "traditional" vendor gives you to eat 40 lemons to get that amount of vitamin C at the same price, and try to eat all of this you will end with problems. The "content" will be the same, but in a way that will be hard to deal with it.
Always remember; Gmail isn't just about the space, it's also about the UI as well. It definitely isn't easy for either Hotmail or Yahoo or any other webmail to compete against it easily.
More than mere navel gazing.
I think what Google is attempting to do with all that storage is get *life* users, i.e. people that will end up archiving 5, 10, or dare I say it, 15 years worth of email. In that span, I could see that 1GB of space coming in handy. One thing that I think Google could do to get me 100% on board would be a way to back up my email archive to my local PC. Not that i'm worried (*right now*) of Google going under, but who know's, 5 or 10 years from now when iv'e amassed a few hundred megs of email.....
People are flocking to GMail because it is the geek thing to do. Everyone wants one and they will beg you for an invite (I know I just gave out my 6).
As far as the design of GMail I am not all that impressed. Search functions are nice and all but I don't use searchs that much. The "conversations" aren't exactly what I want as I would prefer standard folders. I certainly don't like not having an option to keep ALL old emails open in a conversation w/o having to click on them to "expand"). The filters are nice and seem to work well for my uses but I haven't played around with them enough to see just how useful they are.
I haven't received any spam but that's no surprise. I haven't had any issues at work but at home GMail seems sluggish. Almost too sluggish. I don't know why that is but there is a noticable lag after clicking on things at home before actions are taken.
The space is nice and all (and I am forwarding all mail from home -> GMail for now for permanent storage as a test) but it's certainly not necessary. They are going to eliminate it eventually claiming national security or kiddy porno/warez violations.