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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
...they will come But what the feck am I gonna do with 250MB of spam ??
Step 1 - on April 1st, give away 1G mail boxes to all - start with a small Beta group
Step 2 - invest in Hard drives, and wait until MS and others implement size increases
Step 3 - declare it was a joke all along
Step 4 - ???
Step 5 - IPO !!!
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
I have close to 40 gigs of email storage, if I want to fill up my /home partition.
With the amount of spam Hotmail accounts get my guess is that this will simply increase the amount of junk mail Microsoft has to store.
Has google kicked off an email arms race that will end in tears?
250 MB email? I love competition. Not to mention that's one big storage dump on the net. Now let's see how the RIAA can find me transferring MP3's over e-mail
Just think, 250Mb of spam to deal with when you come back from holiday.
Cress, cress, lovely lovely cress
Hotmail and Lycos are missing the point here - people aren't flocking to Google cause of the 1GB of space; it's because of the innovative design; the powerful search; the conversation layout; the lack of intrusive ads etc.
They have to fix the fact that their services are crap before handing out space willy-nilly.
PocketGamer.org - For the gamer on the go!
I was under the impression that most of the people who routinely sent or recieved large attachments had a 'proper' paid email service, with more features than your average webmail. Will any of these new developments lure any of these people back into the land of webmail?
Making the moon less necessary since 1998.
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
If Google all of a sudden now says: "Meh, we tried it out with the testing phase, and we've decided not to start a email service at this time".
Now that Yahoo and Hotmail and everyone else has done the "look, we're offering 1Gig storage too!"
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
Not to mention its less evil! When you use google, only part of your soul is consumed. Better than the alternative I say.
There's more to GMail than pure storage capacity. Personally, i wouldn't consider switching back to Hotmail or any other service until they improve the system in some of the ways Google have -- such as the conversation system for tracking replies, and the searchable "All Mail" folder which holds both incoming and outgoing conversations.
Its funny -- in all the hyperbole about the disk space being offered, people are neglecting some of the real innovations/advancements GMail has managed.
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.
But what good is all that storage space without a proper way of archiving and accessing it?
Remember years ago when the max e-mail size wasn't 2mb and you suddenly got mail bombed? You had to go looking through 100's of pages of mail and deleting all the junk. All that work is enough to give anybody carpel tunnel syndrome. Also, Hotmail's recent restriction on opening only one page at a time only makes the matter worse.
The reason why Gmail can give 1GB of space is because it has developed an excellent system of mail archival, retrieval and display. So unless Hotmail changes its interface and pulls something as good as Google, we are soon going to see frustrated users shifting through many pages of spam.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
Now imagine Google was just bluffing and causing everyone to panic and enlarge their free storage offers. Either ways, for a change the consumer scores....
sigaar
To use a remote computer as permanent storage?
I just don't trust a free service provider to care too much about my data.
That's a little surprising, given that in the past they were so pressed for space that they decided to delete every sent message stored on their servers, so pressed for space that they decided to delete all mail after 45 days of not logging in, up from a year as it had been originally.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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
I bet this is a new and uncomfortable experience for Microsoft, eh?
Who doesn't like free music?
the thing about the 'loads of storage space' thing is, right, archived mail, right? and to get to a web-based email service, I have to be online, right?
what if I'm not online? what if I'm in hicksville on my laptop and want to access an old email message from someone for some really important reason (yeah I know, incoherent sentence, but bear with me)
with the POP mail I have, my messages are RIGHT HERE. In have no need to go connecting to tha Intarweb to do this, right? but Gmail's amazing search capabilities so heavily plugged, are aimed right at this, going through your archived mail, right?
Is there some link I'm not making here? Forgive me, I'm in the pub so maybe I'm just lost.
Screw you all! I'm off to the pub
I have not seen gmail, but I know that one thing that attracted me to google at the start was that on my dialup connection, google was a FAST download, because of its lack of large graphical ads, etc., compared to the slow and bulky yahoo interface. The reason I avoid hotmail and yahoo mail now is because their interfaces are still ad-ridden and bulky and slow as hell on dialup.
If the Gmail interface is as fast as the google interface, gmail will eat hotmail and yahoo for lunch.
Homo Sapiens Americanus--A documentary in p
You should have just posted that in whatever your first language was, I'm sure more people could have understood it.
:) )
TRANSLATION:
Hmm. True. Imagine if Google hadn't launched GMail, you would still have only 2mb on hotmail, like you've had for the last 8 years! On the other hand most of the email I receive is SPAM or junk mail forwards (Almost 2mb worth), now I have 200mgs to look forward too, (wait until I get 2gbs! Haha
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. --
Granted, .mac does a shitload more than these others, but, hey, it's time to boost! :)
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".
How about this aventuremail?. 2GB free storage. cheers
I've been patiently waiting for gmail to become available publicly. But until it does I'll start using my Yahoo account again now that I have increased attachment and storage space. I wonder if hotmail, yahoo and the like are luring away many potential gmail users because of the long beta testing period...?
Easily stopped by preventing an account from being accessed by more than a few IPs in a limited time.
I never understood why email providers limited their subscribers to a measly 5 megs. Most email is pure ASCII text. Every time I have felt the need to compress a text file it nearly disappears. This is even the case when I have used gzip on the 'fastest' settings. A gig of email compressed onto today's unbelievably cheap storage costs a provider like Google, Yahoo or Hotmail damn near nothing!
In the next month or two I fully expect that we are going to see some admititly slow but inexpensive storage solutions. Actually I'm supprised we haven't already seen GmailFS and HotmailFS.
Yeah, i too have no friends and have to resort to emailing myself... :(
Now when are Apple going to follow suit and up the paltry 15mb e-mail storage I get for $99 a year!!!
Shameless self-publicity is all we have!ebyrne.net
I mean, you're absolutely right - storage costs next to nothing per-megabyte, and compression can make it go a lot farther. But consider it like this: almost all the free email services have 'free' and 'premium' offers, and the main thing that differentiates the free from the 'premium' is how much storage you get.
Now, when they give free customers >= 100MBytes of storage, there is less reason to pay for the premium service. So, until GMail came in and broke the cartel's artificial shortage, the email services could count on plenty of people coughing up the cash to get a useable amount of storage.At this point, given the above, why are they increasing their storage quotas? . . . Because if all the free & premium customers decided to move over to GMail (or at least a significant percentage of the user-base), then their current revenues would plummet fast. So, while they get a lot less money per 'free' customer (just the revenue they derive from advertising), by increasing the storage, they mostly take away the prime driver for people to go to GMail.
Predictions: now that GMail is eating away at their ability to sell 'premium' accounts with more storage, I expect that
If you want to pay "e-mail insurance", better buy your own domain and host your e-mail address there. If your ISP goes under, you can always switch.
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
IIRC, yahoo recently advertised an "image free" interface. Never use it myself, but I just checked and there's only a couple of small gifs on the page.
Google may be the poster child for a 'good' corporation but the roll-out of the gmail system is most definitely not one of the better acheievements. By pre-announcing gmail so far in advance, all the other free providers have now upped their storage. While gmail is still not publicly available.
The barriers to switching email address are high; no one wants to ditch the address they may have been using for seven years. gmail's real selling point was the extra storage, but with that advantage negated I don't see so many people likely switch.
Compare with this scenario:
gmail carries out large scale internal testing, carries out a low-key public beta (no additional invites, etc.) and then BOOM! Press announcement "gmail is up and running!!!" . Users now flock to the service because the other providers don't currently offer anything like the storage space of gmail.
the gmail rollout could definitely be handled better. aside from the goolgle fanboys, how many regualr hotmail/yahoo useres will switch now that hotmail/yahoo have increased storage?
it is. the main reason i use gmail is because of its speed.
i don't have to download spam mail from my isp which can take a while on a 56k connection of you have >150 spam emails. With google not only does it sort the spam nicely and out the way, it stops me having to download the body of the email.
Couple that with the other great features of gmail and the fact that i won't fill it and i don't have much reason to use my isp's email address.
The only time i use my isp's email address is for job and university applications.
And completely useless. My email account there does not receive a single message. After some outages and weird behaviour like 3 days to get a message sent to SELF it simply got dormant. Now every single message sent to that address goes AWOL.
The hosting thing is really tricky to work. Expect 2 weeks before your account is set up. I know it's a free service but I think they went overboard on the "1gig" announcement and couldn't handle the load. They are not Google, you know.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
Yes, 10mbyte for the entire message.
So Google and others want to offer a 1GB e-mail service with indexing and searchability. Well, that's fine and dandy as far as ideas go, but you have to remember that this means your mail being stored on someone else's server; possibly for longer than you wanted -- and no way of being sure it's been deleted when you no longer want it.
I'm thinking about rolling my own searchable e-mail archive. And it won't be limited to one poxy gigabyte, either! I could register a domain and point the MX to my TV cable broadband connection, but the IP address is not guaranteed truly static, so there's a possibility that mail could get lost or even wind up on someone else's box -- so I'll trust my existing PO3 connection for now, counting it as another reason to add to my list in favour of a "proper" (read: business class) broadband connection. Next I'll hack Spamassassin to bits: when I'm done, it will store the header info and spamminess test results in a MySQL database, and the body in a text file. While I'm at it, I'll index the attachments in terms of mime type and encoding into another database. Finally, I'll set up some scripts to manage searching according to my databases and body contents.
Eventually -- which is to say, once I can go a month without resorting to phpMyAdmin or grep -- I'll release it; probably under a BSD-like licence, but with this extra little clause: "Any redistribution of the software or derived work in binary form must be accompanied by an offer of the source code, to be valid until the lapse of copyright on the work in question".
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Is it just me or these new huge free email accounts serve as a zero cost online backup solution, for example your digital photos?
NEOCA - Custom LED Flashlights
While 1GB of storage is nice, it's certainly not the only reason I like Gmail. Features like "Search", "Labels", "Conversations", "Keyboard Shortcuts", and a lightning-fast interface help leverage the 1GB of storage enabling me to easily and quickly find and manage my email information in ways I never could.
Also, and sometimes more importantly, Gmail's ads are so unobtrusive and relevent that implementations like Hotmail and Yahoo Mail seem like complete jokes with their flashy, intrusive, irrelevent ads.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
Google turns the tables to imitate its rivals. Changes motto to "Be Evil."
The US continually bought more and more weapons, which it would never use, so that Russia would follow suit -- until Russia bankrupted itself.
Gmail only has a couple of thousand users, so it can continue upping it's storage. Hotmail & Yahoo follow suit, but with it's million users, they asplode!
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.
Yes, Yahoo! has upgraded their service in other countries. At least in Europe.
GMail's rollout appears to have a two-pronged approach: 1) Force other e-mail providers into costly capital expenditures. remember, 1gb of space initially for a couple thousand invitees is still less than 250 mb for millions of users. MS and yahoo's teams will no doubt be prodded to recoup their capital expenditures for all users, while gmail can stay lean and mean as long as it wants, while at the same time dictate the market structure. 2) generate ginormous buzz. As others have said, "why not go to spymac?" The answer for John Q. public lies in the difference in brand equity between spymac and google. If an average user has decided to make a switch over to a new e-mail provider, johndoe@gmail.com is "worth" more than johndoe@spymac.com, regardless of features.
Backup your Hotmail account
I will venture here (or remind those who think that way already) that the real issue is about "owning" everyone's personal files, **not just email**. So the Gig battles are just the opening salvo. Having your files easily accessible from anywhere without you having to lug your laptop or a hard drive *is* useful.
.. recently said, we dont need to run a power generator in every home to get electricity; simialrly why would we need to maintain a server with all its headaches.
/Win comparisons didnt fairly compare systems of the same price, and that the Palm-Handspring thing was for Palm to get into cell phone territory FAST - in hindsight, that was confirmed)
I'd like to hear about alternatives and what this means for the IT/ISP players in the next few years. To elucidate on all this:
It doesnt take a Ph.D to add 1 + 2; and maybe consider a more standards driven approach as in (3)
(1)Microsoft, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, etc. all want to have your personal info for targeted advertising. Both Microsoft and Apple are researching a system whereby all the info in your hard drive is easily searchable.
(2)All indications are that most computing will soon be delivered over the (internet) pipes, with broadband available everywhere. ( SUN's original motto, then IBM's, now everyone's)
Well, personally, until the dust settles on the privacy issues I wouldnt mind having a GMail account to use as "light" personal/business info internet folder.
I use my own server VPN connection meantime, so I can already always access all my files from anywhere. But i dont see it being a practical mode for the majority of users - as
(3)which goes back to the issue, might it not be better in the meantime for all ISP's to adopt a standard user-friendly personal data repository, possibly mirroring what the user has at home/office ?
Andre
PS. Slightly off topic, on a personal note: if I'm on target on this issue, that would make it 3 out of 3. (previous posts indicated that the MAC
-------------------------------------------------
Argh, now all my crappy accounts have tons of space, but I still can't try out gmail. :( It's a conspiracy, as I've never gotten an Orkut invite either. :|
I have a friend who has a paid Yahoo! account and I sent him an invite while he was over at my place. He logged in to Yahoo! to retrieve the invite (which of course had been placed in the Spam folder, but that's neither here nor there). When he finally found it and got signed up he couldn't stop talking about how cool Gmail was, how fast it was, thanks a lot for the invite, etc. etc.
Then the next day Yahoo! upped their space for paid users to 2 gigs or whatever it was, and all the sudden he was gloating about "I have TWO gigs!".
Yeah, man. Two gigs of a service you were blasting yesterday for being slow and inferior. Whatever.
I guess the point is that to some extent these carrots are working, and they're able to make users forget their pain by offering more space.
I have faith that in time he'll remember how fast his Gmail account is and start moving over there. Our friends and family can be extracted from the dark side - it'll just take some work.
Oh, what? You don't have a Gmail account yet? Well, I gots four invites left - hit me up at kevinomara bat gmail mot com.
After couples months, most of them declared a free "large space" emails are "unmaintainable". Sina decreased their account from 50M to 5M, and even a company called 263 canceled their free email service, "As a professional ISP, we dont need click rate from the unrelated public" they explained the reason something like that.
Till now etang still provides unlimited space email access if you pay about 40 USD a year(Sorry, it is Chinese). But most people never interest it.
Regarding my previous experiense, a "unlimited" email space is not the key point attacting public to their service. The more important question is : HOW LONG?
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.....
Now, I haven't used Gmail, but what makes searching your email through Gmail any better than a grep? (or any old indexed search if you prefer). The POINT of the Google search algorithm is to rely on cross-references between items in the search space to determine which items are the most likely to be important.
There are no cross-references between emails.
(well, besides In-Reply-To, which is not too tough -- finding the first email in a thread is not particularly hard).
I usually search the _web_ for something I don't know a lot about in order to find out more about it. But when I search my email, it is because I am trying to remember a specific detail of a certain conversation. I have to know a word or two in the email in both cases in order to find it anyway.
Look what happens when you search google for the keyword "gmail" - this site comes up third!
http://gmail-is-too-creepy.com/
Good on google for not censoring it, Cant imagine MS would allow that..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
Mailinator.com
No account sign-up, no password, just type in any user account name you can think of and check the email for it. Works great for the bazillion or so sites out there that have "free registration" but require a valid email address. All emails are deleted after a few hours.
Heyy, slow down cowboy!
]
Yahoo! Mail was the first to upgrade their service following Gmail's storage boost.
If you send email messages to some Hotmail address, they bounce them back to you with no aparent reasons. And don't say that you haven't had some email message bounced back saying "action failed". As I don't save all my email messages, many proofs are gone.
I remember once that I wrote about 10 email messages to a Hotmail.com user and he only got one. In my last message I was asking if he had a non-Hotmail account. I don't know why, but this message wasn't bounced back. He told me that his Hotmail inbox was empty.
Anyway, here's one proof:
She has told me that her Hotmail email account is active, is not the wrong one, and her mailbox is not full nor empty. I have tried to contact her via email several times with no success.
Short version:
64.4.50.99 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: 550 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable
Long version:
24 Jun 2004 14:11:20 -0000
From: MAILER-DAEMON@[removed]
To: [removed]
Subject: failure delivery
Message from [removed].
Unable to deliver message to the following address(es).
[removed]@hotmail.com:
64.4.50.99 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: 550 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable
Giving up on 64.4.50.99.
--- Original message follows.
Return-Path: [removed]
Message-ID: 20040624141120.8231.******@********.****.[removed
Received: from [**.**.**.***] by ********.****.[removed] via HTTP; Thu,
24 Jun 2004 07:11:20 PDT
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2004 07:11:20 -0700 (PDT)
From: [removed]
Subject: hello
To: [removed]@hotmail.com
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Are you getting my email messages?
Note: some email addresses, hostnames (excepting hotmail.com) and IPs have been removed due to privacy issues.
[removed] = email address, username or hostname.
I'm not sure you can call Google honest, only that they have not been proven dishonest, unlike Microsoft.
Google is still a company, the point of which is to make a profit. I don't think they're going to do anything nefarious with my e-mail, but I also don't give them any special dispensation because one of their mottos is "Don't be evil." So far they're just a company which makes a very good search engine, and a few peripheral tools and utilities. I don't see anything to make me think they're honest or dishonest, they are just good at providing their service.
"What if they're using IE?" "I've dumbed Mozilla down to cope with it." - BOFH
I was surprised to discover a couple of severe limitations to my GMail account. 1) Attachment size is limited to 10MB. 2) Email attachments such as .exe and other "suspicious" files are not transferred. This includes files placed in achives (.zip, .tar, .tgz, .taz, .z, .gz) formats.
In other words, I'm stuck storing a few pictures, a couple of mp3s per message, and a heck of a lot of source code.
Unfortunate, because I was hoping to use GMail as a very effective archive tool for stuff I want to keep.
Even the DSL provider SBC is going to boost their storage to 100mb for mail accounts. I'd still rather have a gmail invite though.
I invite you all to Hotmail but can anyone invite me to Gmail? :-)