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Hotmail Means to Double Gmail Storage
deputydink writes "Osviews reports that Microsoft's free email service, Hotmail, is throwing down to Google by increasing the free storage to 2GB! I wonder how choked the Hotmail Plus subscribers will be."
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I had an email telling me about the wonderful upgrades, but I haven't seen any yet, and my box is permanently around 85% full. Even with the spam filter cranked up, they still let threw the odd vew fival attachments that push me over the limit. And as you can see----^ I've moved to gmail...
All I have to say is that it would be the funniest thing, EVER, to see that Google at April 1, 2005 (the first announcement of Gmail was 1-4-04) is just like 'April Fools suckas'
-Brandon
I have roughly all mails I've ever sent and received still in my archived folders. About 1.4Gigs worth of mostly useless correspondence. But hey I just can't part with it.
I've had some close calls with busted HDrives and other panic situations. But I'ts still there.
Now they are trying to tell me that all my mails since 1994 (or indeed from now until 2014) can be stored on web at no cost.
Doesn't anyone else have a "(good + good) (b + b) true" feeling?
I've defenitly got a "b-lieve it when IC it" feeling.
I'm especially interested in the "catch"...
Ehh, I dunno. I call BS on that. I know that Microsoft will eventually have to increase the limit of space given, but I somehow doubt that a company that was charging money for a tiny bit of space is all of a sudden going to just give out 2 GB for free. Do we know who the contributor was? Also... in the article it says that Microsoft won't bother us with graphic ads. Again, BS. I see more ads on Hotmail than I do on some pr0n sites. I highly doubt they'll just drop them.
OK, googled it, found these: In 1998, the attempt to migrate to NT apparently failed. And in 2002, they appear to have tried again.
Anybody know if it worked?
It may very well be an improvement on the UI. I wouldn't know, its impossible to sign up.
I was interested when GMail was first announced, but if they're going to make me beg for an account, they can shove it.
Hotmail sucks big time, but at least its accessible.
I got my 250 megabytes today. Not that my Hotmail account is anything more than a spamtrap right now...
Is it just me or does this just show that Microsoft is missing the point. Yes, it's nice that they will offer 2GB, but honestly, who cares whether you have 1GB or whether you have 2GB? The real advantage is Gmail's interface. Furthermore, Google said Gmail would have 1GB mailboxes and it did. Microsoft said weeks ago that they would increase the mailbox size to 250MB and now has upped that to 2GB. Guess what though, all mailboxes are still 2MB!! 1,000 real MB is more useful than 1,998 phantom megs.
I use Hotmail through Outlook Express on Windows XP (there goes my credibility). It works pretty well though I have to say, though occasionally multiple accounts confuse it. I keep my Hotmail empty, and immediately move email to my regular inbox (because the quota is still very low)
It catches most of the junk mail, though I've found that if you get some spam to your Hotmail Inbox it's better to go to the webmail page, and report it as junk mail rather than just deleting it. If you don't report it they continue to let in the same type of email again and again.
I agree
However, this isnt' simply about raising the stakes up to attract new users. This is also about retaining the existing ones - millions out there who are tired to Hotmail (simply because it was the first and at one time the only, free email service provider). Add to this those users who are tied to hotmail because of using MSN messenger as well.
Now with Gmail offering such a vast leap over storage space, a large number of those users would be ready to migrate (no matter how painful it would be) to other email providers. However, if Hotmail provides them similar (or better) service (read storage - since that's the only thing that has been talked about most everywhere), they would have no reason to.
http://efil.blogspot.com/
It's a war, but it's not going to be about storage. Gmail doesn't need to match Hotmail on the 2GB storage (at least yet).
/yr) starts to look a little paltry - It will be interesteing to see what they do in response to this.
On the other hand, apples paid subscription service (idisk) with 100 MB of storage (At $99
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
You are correct that it classifies most spam as spam and puts it in the "Junk Mail" folder.
Unfortunately, the Junk Mail folder counts against your storage allowance, so for me it is almost as bad as not filtering it at all. Also, I guess I have one of those easily guessed user names, so I get a lot of spam.
I could allow "Contacts Only", but then everything that isn't a contact goes to junk mail, and a lot of mail that isn't spam (but also isn't from a contact) goes to junk mail, and again, it is just like not having a spam filter.
And the interface does suck
I'm sorry you read this as a knee-jerk anti-MS rant, I think I am looking at this fairly objectively. BTW, I have had a Hotmail account since long before MS bought it.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
I was interested when GMail was first announced, but if they're going to make me beg for an account, they can shove it.
i was interested too. interested enough to buy an invite from ebay (back before they changed the TOS. now everyones favourite "had to" close down my account. great business plan.
1. create product
2. create demand
3. artifically restrict supply
4. fuck over the poor users
real friendly like. thanks for the advanced notice google. all that mail i have/had stored there is now effectively lost. sure, its on their servers and they can see it, but i cant fuckin access it. sort of goes against the whole "never delete an email again" concept
TIAEAE!
Hotmail is unusable anyway as long as it only supports receiving mails in ISO-8859-1. It silently ignores the charset defined in the mail headers.
:)
2gb is nice though. But I already have a real mail server with ~10GB storage
Erik Dalén
I traced the story to theinquirer.net/?article=17949 and there is no utterence as to the validity of the story.
/.
This may be a way of theinquirer.net getting some advertising out of
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
iDisk is only one part of Apple's subscription service(.mac).
.mac also lets you access your bookmarks from any computer with internet access.
Along with the 100MB of storage, it includes hosting, several commercial applications, and several discounts on software and subscription.
Yes, I know that. However, its the only bit I'm really interested in, and its way too small. The antivirus stuff will probably be useful one day when there are a few viruses around, and I use my own domain's for eMail.
But you would have to ask why, as a paid subscription service, they offer 10% of the storage of gMail.
I would love to use idisk, and when I can offload a significant amount of the 40 GB of backup data I have online, I will do so.
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
The big plus to hotmail over gmail right now if that hotmail supports rich clients. You can use it without ads and with full offline support through Outlook or Outlook Express. Try pulling out the cable and reading your Gmail. That and you can actually get a gmail account without groveling or buying one on ebay. Incidentally, I did get one a few weeks ago but am already relegated to a really long login name that isn't firstname.lastname because every permutation was already used up!
Ok, So I hear that the free accounts are being raised to 250MB, and that the paid "plus" accounts are being raised to 2GB. So what happens to the users like me that currently have (from Verizon online dsl) a 25 MB "Premium" account. What will we be raised to (if they ever actually get around to it)?
What's done's in the past, forever shall last.
Work is work; life is life; fair is not!
Wow, what a frickin waste of a gmail invite!
You should use Yahoo for disposable accounts... 100MB is plenty for that shit.
The unofficial
What a brilliant comment. So if you only read the sports section of the newspaper the newspaper is a rip-off for having the nerve to charge you for all those pesky other pages and you should go around ranting that it is only a sports section, the rest of the paper doesn't exist?
.mac don't exist. I am just saying that they are of relatively little value to me.
.mac and never use half the stuff, is this to apple's disadvantage?
/. complain about the encryption on that being cracked.
e )
Whoa, hang back a second here. I'm not saying that the other bits of
But the flip side of the coin - are you seriously suggesting that you think that the 15MB of storage for eMails and 100MB of personal storage is enough for you? Well, perhaps it is, but it isn't nearly enough for me, nor is it enough for many others now. And if I subscribe to
I'm not trying to shoot down apple, I am seriously happy with my powerbook and my wife uses her iBook like she has never used any other computer. They work, and I like.
However, some things that apple do are crippled deliberately to promote further sales. iSync can sync your personal data to all sorts of stuff - your phone, your PDA, your idisk and your ipod - but not to any other external hard drive. Which is a pity if you want more storage than you can buy in an iPod. Likewise iTunes is the only client to stream audio to an airport express - but I didn't hear anyone on
So I'm saying, yes, I want more storage, and I'm not paying money to apple until it offers a gig of storage on the iDisk for a little less than $350 per year (current pricing on website http://www.mac.com/1/mac_faq.html#upgradingstorag
And no, you can't get more than one gig on iDisk, probably because with their pricing model they know that nobody will ever take the subscription out.
In other words - 1 GB iDisk $350 per year. 1 GB gMail - free. Something is wrong there with somebody's pricing model for such a difference to exist.
And when apple realises this and drops its price a bit, more people (including myself) will pay them money for the services.
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
Not sure what everyone's talking about, but my hotmail account has been upt to 250 megs for at least a week now, can't remember exactly when they turned it on.
This is the second time that Microsoft has made grandiose announcements about how much space they will give away for free, but nothing has really changed - Yahoo stepped up to the plate immediately and gave everyone 100 MB.
Let's look at that more closely; Yahoo said they were going to give everyone 100 MB, then they did it. Microsoft has promised always promised the moon but we're all still waiting.
Why put up with it? Try out Yahoo mail - it's really really good, and it's really really 100 MB. Right now. Not tomorrow, or "soon", now.
Why does anyone, let along
Really, it's not google's fault that you went out and bought a beta account, from a third party, for a service that will be available to you for FREE.
Have some patience.
stuff
- To: Useless, as people will Cc a list, or the email will be sent to a smaller list which is then redistributed to the larger list. Bugtraq is an example of this.
- From: Some lists set the "From" header to their own address, others leave it unaltered. In the latter case, the "From" header is useless, unless you happen to have a full subscriber list. Even if you do, you're screwed if somebody is subscribed to two different lists that you are on.
- Subject: This usually works for lists that insert the list name into the subject. However, there are exceptions. I'm subscribed to the DBMail users list which inserts "[dbmail]" into the subject. I also receive bounce notifications from my mailer daemon which includes "DBMail" in the subject. If I set a filter to match "[dbmail]" in the subject, it ignores the square brackets and so tags the bounced messages as well. It also tags emails on the dbmail-dev list.
By applying multiple labels I have it working after a fashion. It took way too much time however for such a simple task.I know and understand Gmail is in beta. I have reported all the problems I have had months ago. None have been fixed. However, the very fact that you cannot search by a user-defined header baffles me. I can only assume they index the messages by to, from, and subject, and don't cache the rest of the headers in a usable form.
Shrug. In the end of the day, I don't particularily care, I'll continue using Sylpheed-Claws which copes extremely well. I would have like a web-based backup though for when I'm not near my laptop. I guess I'll have to finish writing my own.
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
Thanks to archive.org, you can find the list here.
Isn't that a known law of business? As a company grows bigger and older, it becomes less and less efficient, especially at the managerial level. Why? Because incompetent managers, fearing for their job, make sure only people who are less competent than themselves get hired. Let's not forget to overpay those suckers to squelch their ambition, further improving job security.
Karma: Could be worse (could be raining)
I am wondering why nobody has done this yet. With a limit on attachment size and a good spam filter, most people's mailboxes will stay rather small.
Of course, it will be the people that do receive lots of mail (I receive about 100 MB/month) that first jump on it.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I beg to differ. Gmail's UI is geared towards low volumes of email. If, like me, you receive thousands of emails a week, a number of major problems rear their heads.
You are right that Gmail is not perfect. Since getting my account some weeks ago, I've been keeping a list of needed improvements - everything from outright bugs (I can tell you how to make it say "displaying items 101-100 of 100") to wish-list items like importing address books, or even importing whole e-mail archives with the correct dates. I have nearly forty such items on my list.
Despite all its warts, though, I agree with the first poster that Gmail is a huge improvement over Hotmail and other free webmail sites. I've Hotmail, Yahoo, Excite, and a half-dozen smaller providers. None is nearly as good as Gmail. That doesn't mean I want Gmail to stop where it is. Although its javascript-intensive design works fine on Mozilla, I would also like to see a plain HTML interface. Hell, I'd also love to see an IMAP interface, but I don't see that happening. But even as is now, Gmail is better than any free webmail provider I've used.
I have my account subscribed to LKML and a dozen other high-traffic linux-related lists, some of them with similar names. I don't have much trouble keeping the messages correctly tagged, although I have to admit I look at only a small percentage of them. On occasion, I do see some messages that Gmail can't parse correctly for some odd reason probably related to bad MIME-encodings.
It would be helpful if Gmail would let us filter messages based on arbitrary headers like Delivered-To:, or the special X- tags that most good mailing-list software adds to messages.
Mod down all those twats who beg for Gmail accounts in every story mentioning them; and also those showoffs offering them. Everybody will havwe a Gmail account in a couple of months.
Here's my secret: I asked for an invite on my local LUG mail list. I had an invite within 4 hours. The lone invite that I've had to give out was posted on the same list.
the no
I got the 2GB storage about a week ago( I am a paying customer). Before that, I saw the "more store coming soon" message for about 2 weeks. I think the hotmail spam filter is pretty good. Most spam goes to the junk mail folder.
It'd be nice to dehumanize companies like that, but I contacted eBay via their contact form re: my suspended account, and eBay not only called me on the cell phone number I provided the next day, they called back a few hours later when I didn't answer the first time. Spoke with the eBay rep for approx. 30 seconds, he informed me my account had been reinstated and that was that.
I've heard horror stories before, but it IS possible to get in touch with people from companies like that, when they need to speak with you. Unfortunately, despite its' perceived convenience to us, if their contact page consisted of a mailto: link and a phone number, and all automated emails were sent from aliases that people watched, customer service would go into the tubes as their overloaded reps struggled to wade through the mass horde of emails and phone calls about things that didn't need to be discussed over the phone.
So, just block the ads. I would be impressed if even Mircrosoft was powerful enough to say, "2% of users didnt' actually view the ads, but pay us for them anyway!"
Disks in my area can be had for as little as 25 cents per gigabyte. Presuming a user actually uses the full two gigs, ad revenues would probably pay the $0.50 in a short time.
How about you just ask someone? Nicely? A lot of people have GMail invites sitting around.
... I still wouldn't go back to spam^H^H^H^Hhotmail. Not ever since Micro$oft bought hotmail and took away every single useful feature one by one. Back in 1997, things like auto-forwarding emails and POP3 used to be freely available. There was no time limit set on how often you had to check your account either. Heck, I was away from the Internet for nearly 4 months, and my account still existed. There was even a time when it didn't require cookies. Ah the good old days....
Then one day I logged in to find all my Sent messages had been wiped out. There were over 300 of them, all used to keep track of things. That was the final straw. I had already switched to the far superior Yahoo and will never ever go back to hotmail.
For those feeling nostalgic, I found an old page of what Hotmail used to look like. (Disable Javascript first to get rid of that annoying geocities garbage.) Too bad I can't log in or anything.
Why is it that my "2MB" Hotmail account claims to be 75% full when I have 0.75MB of mail stored (I know this because I have had pretty much the same messages in there as I did before the upgrade to 2MB)?
I think they are just going to lie about it. Like they do with everything else.
In any case, I would like to see this tested when they unveil it (like Kevin Rose did with Gmail).
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
Moreover, Hotmail doesn't even begin to compete with gmail as far as the interface, searchability options, multiple labels, &c go.
Nice try, MS.
--A witty sig proves nothing.--
The facts are that GMail doesn't exist for most users. Google has waited too long between announcing the offering and producing something to be used.
"Invites" aside, the facts are that GMail does NOT yet exist since it is only available to those willing to buy an invite from EBay.
Google previously had the potential advantage of more storage --- and now it doesn't.
E-mail is the single largest traditional offering that a service provider may offer to encourage customer loyalty. Google offering such an advantage quickly may have caused quite a stir. This is because the "old regime" (MSN, Yahoo, AOL) may have to fight for the loyalty that they had won early in the game. This would have caused a lot of market movement and pressure.
Having seen this threat, they have adjusted. There is no longer a reason that a consumer should switch even if the option was actually available --- which it is not.
As a consumer of services, I no longer care about it. Frankly, it isn't worth talking about any longer. GMail is already dead in the water.