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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.'"
...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
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!
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
Yep - just shows the power of the free market once again!
Think how little progress we'd see if large segments of the IT industry were dominated by single large corporations with no incentive to innovate..... oh wait.....
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.
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.
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I bet this is a new and uncomfortable experience for Microsoft, eh?
Who doesn't like free music?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I disagree totally. Gmail's two-phase rollout has given Google the option to observe the competition's response and react to it before their service is even officially launched (not to mention creating a buzz that would make Seth Godin proud).
I've had a GMail account for about two months now and the system is in a constant state of flux. I've reported bugs one day and they've been fixed the next. Each and every bug report or piece of feedback gets a personal response from the Google team. They are very serious about perfecting the system.
The only reason Google are waiting so long to launch it is because they want to make sure it's the best webmail out there bar none. When it's launched, that's when the comparisons can really start. And that's when Hotmail et al won't be able to shake a stick at Gmail.
---- scrm
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.....
Google may just be hurting this whole e-mail industry more than it is helping.
Um, the original point was regarding the benefit to consumers. It's not hurting anyone, from that perspective. The competition is free and serves to remove excess profits from the industry, not profits altogether (the definition of a market approaching efficiency).
Read jack phelps dot net
Do not send large attachments over email.
Again, do not send large attachments over email.
Nothing is worse then trying to download a really important email, but being stuck waiting for a hand full of large, mostly less-important messages to download. Ofoto, Shutterfly, and others offer free image hosting, allowing your friends & family the chance to view pictures at their leisure -- and often order hard copies as a bonus. Not everybody has broadband access, and us "Technology Haves" should be teaching the "have nots" to 1) not send huge f'in emails and 2) don't blindly open every attachment you get.
In conclusion, do not send large attachments over email.
Consider this scenario:
- Spammer snags a gmail account.
- Spammer gets invite credits
- Spammer "invites" a dozen fake spam accounts to gmail
- Spammer starts using those new acounts as response boxes for spam
- Google flags this
- Google deletes receiving accounts
- Google notes that they all originated from invites from one account.
- Google deletes that account as well.
End result: Spammer has no way to receive his (the vast majority of spammers are guys) responses, goes back to using shotmail or aohell accounts. This results in gmail accounts maintaining their perceived value.Hopefully, someone from gmail will recognize the value of keeping the invite system, either exclusively, or alongside a seperate open system.
Anyone want to point this thread to the gmail developers?