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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."

16 of 616 comments (clear)

  1. Re:That'll be nice... by REBloomfield · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...

  2. Couple a megachips... by lilmikey1982 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:Good business by Jade+E.+2 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Microsoft paid, what, $400 million for Hotmail. Then they must have paid quite a bit to port the back end to Windows.
    I was under the impression that Hotmail still used IIS web servers talking to the original Solaris backend. That was way back when they had only had it for a year or two though... Could be different now.

    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?

  4. Re:WAR! by Curtman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  5. Missing the point by iamdrscience · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  6. Re:That'll be nice... by eraserewind · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  7. Re:WAR! by manavendra · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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/
  8. Re:WAR! by mgv · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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).

    On the other hand, apples paid subscription service (idisk) with 100 MB of storage (At $99 /yr) starts to look a little paltry - It will be interesteing to see what they do in response to this.

    Michael

    --
    There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
  9. Re:WAR! by lucas+teh+geek · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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!
  10. Charset support by erikdalen · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
  11. Re:WAR! by mgv · · Score: 3, Interesting

    iDisk is only one part of Apple's subscription service(.mac).

    Along with the 100MB of storage, it includes hosting, several commercial applications, and several discounts on software and subscription. .mac also lets you access your bookmarks from any computer with internet access.


    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.
  12. Re:WAR! by mgv · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

    Whoa, hang back a second here. I'm not saying that the other bits of .mac don't exist. I am just saying that they are of relatively little value to me.

    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 .mac and never use half the stuff, is this to apple's disadvantage?

    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 /. complain about the encryption on that being cracked.

    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#upgradingstorage )

    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.
  13. Microsoft FUD as usual by stu72 · · Score: 3, Interesting


    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 /.'rs, put up with it?

  14. Re:WAR! by krymsin01 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
  15. Re:WAR! by feargal · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Gmail is a *huge* improvement over Hotmail on the user interface level.
    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.
    1. There is no way to distinguish similarily named mailing lists. You can only filter based on "To, "From", and "Subject" headers. Let's examine the options:
      • 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.
    2. New filters cannot be applied retroactively. If you receive a few hundred emails that need classifying and come up with a filter for them, you then have to manually apply it to the older messages. I still have about 8,000 unclassified emails because they came in before I created filters for them.
    3. Their address book is terrible, and there isn't any way to import an existing one.
    4. There's many more problems, including their stupid lack of a plain HTML version. That one I could understand if they were rushing to a launch date and wanted a feature-rich, IE only version out the door. They do not seem hurried at all though, so they really should have started with a simple standards compliant version and then added the per-browser bells and whistles. I have to go do some work however, so I'll end my rant shortly.

    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"
  16. Re:WAR! by critter_hunter · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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)