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."

Comments

WAR!

[alaric_uk]

Holy storage wars!

Re:WAR!

[Johnny2Bags]

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).

Hotmail is offering 2GB because that's all they got up their sleves. Gmail is a *huge* improvement over Hotmail on the user interface level. And the Gmail spam filter is pretty awesome.

Storage is only a factor until a certain degree - meaning that 2MB is nearly impossible to live off of, but beyond 1 GB you are just talking wasted space for most users.

Some may disagree, but at least in the near future, as far as e-mail is concerned - 1 GB will more than suit 97% of the webmail users out there.

Right now I don't see Gmail touching their storage level. First and foremost they will focus on the user experience, new features, server availability, etc. Then maybe down the line when they see a large threshold of their users in need of more space, they will either then up the storage on all accounts, or offer paid premium accounts.

And on an extra note as a Hotmail user, I don't trust anything they are saying right now, they promised more space like months ago and still haven't delivered. I love my Gmail though.

Re:WAR!

[Curtman]

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.

Re:WAR!

[AzureLunatic]

I got my 250 megabytes today. Not that my Hotmail account is anything more than a spamtrap right now...

Re:WAR!

[manavendra]

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.

Re:WAR!

[mgv]

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

Re:WAR!

[nzgeek]

I wouldn't worry about it. I've got gmail, (bgracewood@gmail.com) and to tell the absolute truth, it really is not all that exciting.

The spam filtering is okay. I've had one or two legitimate list emails noted as false positives. Nothing new here.

Forum reply notifications get lumped under one big conversation because Google thinks they are part of a conversation. Err, bzzzzt wrong! Plus the funky javascript preview thing cuts off the most important part of those emails (the link to the forum thread).

The contacts system is an abomination. You can enter a name and an email and some notes. No room for address, phone or anything.

Sure it's a beta, but IMHO it's like a 0.4 rather than a 0.9 version.

Re:WAR!

[iezhy]

My God, 2 Gb of "increase your penis/tits", "buy viagra" and "super xxx site" spams? i wont bare it...

Re:WAR!

[lucas teh geek]

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

Re:WAR!

[mattkinabrewmindspri]

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.

Re:WAR!

[mgv]

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

Re:WAR!

[MikeDX]

I just read your journal.. Damn dude you are angry!

I have to admit that large corps rarely have anything human to say to their subscribers (paying or not), take eBay for instance, you can't even speak to a human, its all automated and the people behind it are locked away behind closed doors. Ever tried complaining to ebay? They closed my account for non payment of £1.12. They send emails out with "do not reply to this address" how on earth am I supposed to contact you then? Carrier pigeon? No I have to use the crappy contact system and go around in the endless loop of automated answers.

I have a theory - The bigger the company is, the bigger percentage of idiots working for said company. Read into that what you will.

Re:WAR!

[Compumyst]

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)?

Re:WAR!

[Gherald]

Wow, what a frickin waste of a gmail invite!

You should use Yahoo for disposable accounts... 100MB is plenty for that shit.

Re:WAR!

[mgv]

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

Re:WAR!

[IAEBG]

Yahoo! Mail has been offering 2GB to their Premium subscribers for the last couple of months.

Re:WAR!

[krymsin01]

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.

Re:WAR!

[Smork]

I'm using MSN messenger just fine without a hotmail address. I think you're confusing Passport and Hotmail. Passport can use any e-mail and is not restricted to hotmail addresses only.

But I can understand the confusion since they seem linked together, in the sign-up process it is very vague...

Re:WAR!

[feargal]

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.

Re:WAR!

[Svennig]

You wont bare it? Thank god for that!

Re:WAR!

[downbad]

Gmail is a *huge* improvement over Hotmail on the user interface level.

Too bad their "hugely improved" interface doesn't work with Opera, Links, Dillo, older versions of Mozilla, and countless other browsers.

Hotmail and Yahoo!'s webmail do.

Re:WAR!

[Anonymous Coward]

So, let me get this straight:

You bought a BETA Gmail account off ebay - a pretty stupid thing to do since its easy to get your own one for free - and started using it as your primary email address.

Now that its gone you're complaining at google for taking away your BETA Gmail account which you bought under dubious circumstances.

I'm sorry, I have no sympathy for you - you're just an idiot.

Re:WAR!

[aslate]

Well, if you check your Address Book, there is a link to "Import Contacts" near the top, which if you've been checking the help section and feedback sections, has been listed for ages. They even have a whole guide to importing if you have trouble.

And, looking at the Help section, they're looking at implementing a plain HTML version too.

Re:WAR!

[avdp]

3. yes there is, I imported all my Outlook address book into Gmail. Look again, it's a new feature (within the last two months).

4. their interface works perfectly under firefox. It is not IE only.

This is a beta service. Except improvements.

Re:WAR!

[critter_hunter]

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.

Re:WAR!

[kzinti]

Storage is only a factor until a certain degree - meaning that 2MB is nearly impossible to live off of, but beyond 1 GB you are just talking wasted space for most users.

You are right, but look at that fact another way: the vast majority of users can't begin to fill 1GB in the foreseeable future. (I got a gmail account some weeks ago, subscribed it to LKML, and every other high-traffic linux list I could find - and it's now at only 15%.) Once capacity gets beyond about 100MB, most users won't come anywhere near their limit in the next couple of years.

In fact, I'd bet that Google probably doesn't have enough disk space on hand for n users * 1 GB. They're probably under by (WAG) 90%. But that makes sense - why buy all the storage they're going to need right now if most if it is going to sit empty? With disk drives falling in price every day, it makes sense - especially at that scale - to purchase space only as it's needed.

Therefore, Google's 1GB limit doesn't really mean anything, except as a foil to those few radical cases who see free storage as a chance to mail their pr0n collection to themselves, thus achieving an offsite backup. For most users, the limit might as well be 2GB. Or 10GB. Or 100GB. Given that (a) most users can't use all their space and (b) Google's not buying drives for that empty space anyway, then the limit becomes just a marketing tactic... but a good one, considering how much attention it has gotten for gmail.

The guys over at Hotmail are just now figuring this out.

My guess: when gmail is finally opened to the public, it will at least match the free storage of any other service out there, if not exceeding the others. Maybe 2GB, maybe 5GB, but I expect to see more that 1GB.

Re:WAR!

[gnu-generation-one]

"Increase your mailbox size by 100%!!!"

Re:WAR!

[kzinti]

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.

Re:WAR!

[mrtroy]

Looking at each of your issues seperately:
1. 99 of people wont care.

2. New filters cannot be applied retroactively : This is the first legitimate problem I have found with Gmail. You can do a sample search of your new filter, and then select those email, and then apply label to them (but if you have 100's it is not practical)

3. You can import a variety of existing address books.

4. There's many more problems, including their stupid lack of a plain HTML version I do not agree that their lack of a "plain HTML version" is a problem, gmail functions perfectly in IE and firefox, so I dont see the need for a plain text version. With the natural growth of technology, you have to leave some things behind, and I dont see a need for any plain HTML sites now. As a developer myself, I have not worked with "plain HTML" for 5+ years.

Re:WAR!

[mj01nir]

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.

Re:WAR!

[stevesliva]

• The spam filtering is okay. I've had one or two legitimate list emails noted as false positives. Nothing new here.
• the funky javascript preview thing cuts off the most important part of those emails

Google has been tweaking both those features in the past few weeks. I recently noticed a number of mailing lists had been dropped into Spam, even though I had filters set to label them. That isn't happening anymore. And I believe the view message pane has begun showing more of the message w/o having to launch a popup.

Annoyances: Bad contacts and filters sorting. No notifications of messages in Spam, filter-labeled messages in Spam are hidden from inbox.

What's nice is that the number of filters is unlimited, versus hotmail's 10, the ability to search your old messages with google's engine, and less obtrusive, even interesting ads.

Re:WAR!

[andy1307]

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.

Re:WAR!

[Senzei]

More than likely he just does not want to keep anything important on an email system that is in beta status. Granted according to the EULA none of the web email providers are responsible for their systems losing your mail. If I had a gmail account I wouldn't trust it with anything important either. Until its finalized I would treat it as any other piece of beta software, test it as much as possible but don't depend on it for anything.

Re:WAR!

[SpiffyMarc]

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.

Re:WAR!

[pnutjam]

Comcast has increased Their email storage size to 250MB, up to 7 email address per subscriber.

Re:WAR!

[ian mills]

You're comparing apples to oranges. The only way Gmail can offer 1GB or space on their email accounts is that the majority of people will probably not use it. And with attachments limited to a certain size, it isn't easy to fill up. However with iDisk, if you're paying for that space you will most likely use it, and since iDisk doesn't have attachment limits it is also easier to fill. That said, iDisk pricing is a bit steep, but comparing it to gmail isn't really fair.

Re:WAR!

[exhilaration]

Yahoo on the other hand offers an 'old' interface that requires no javascript

Gmail will have the plain-HTML version done soon. Check out the list of stuff they're working on.

(both links might require a Gmail login)

Re:WAR!

[kisielk]

How about you just ask someone? Nicely? A lot of people have GMail invites sitting around.

That'll be nice...

[dmayle]

2GB. That's nice and all, but when are they going to actually deliver on the 10MB they promised everyone? I don't use Hotmail, but my girlfriend does, and I'm unable to send her any attachments larger than about 500k because she keeps old emails...

Re:That'll be nice...

[REBloomfield]

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...

Re:That'll be nice...

[Build6]

considering the integration Outlook Express, Entourage et al have with Hotmail, for many people Hotmail *isn't* just "web"-mail.

that said, I'm still waiting for the storage upgrade they promised, up from 2MB to whatever. I was going to retire my hotmail account and go elsewhere, but I decided to wait when they announced. It's starting to sound like what they've been known to do in the past - announce vapourware in order to delay migration/movement to elsewhere.

Re:That'll be nice...

[Anonymous Coward]

The article got it a bit wrong. The free service will be offering only 250mb whereas hotmail plus will give you 2 gig. The free service emails will be limited to 10mb and plus will be 20mb. Still quite far behind Gmail it seems... http://www.imagine-msn.com/hotmail/en-us/

Re:That'll be nice...

[eraserewind]

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.

Re:That'll be nice...

[Gumph]

of course it is. How else can I read my email when on a course/at a clients site/on holiday?? There are many occasions when it is nice to have email without lugging a damn laptop round with me.
and as for hotmail and gmail just forget them and use yahoo instead, it has 100 Mb of space and so will do for most people (in fact yahoo has always had more space on offer than hotmail (at least in the UK) since I started using it last Millenium!!!) Plus it has good (IMHO) spam filters that work pretty well now I have 'trained' them.

Re:That'll be nice...

[De Lemming]

For the moment, the Gmail size limit per mail is also 10MB, which in practice (encoding) translates to a max 7MB attachment.

Re:That'll be nice...

[beaverbrother]

When i log in to my hotmail account it tells me:

This fall, your MSN e-mail will include:

2GB of storage for your inbox

20MB send/receive attachment size

Now: Web e-mail with no graphical ads!

I'm holding out...

[mellonhead]

Until they come out with a free service that includes the installation of a server with a terabyte of storage in my basement.

Can google respond in kind?

[Sipos]

I see no reason why google won't just increase their space by the same factor. Noone will use more than a few hundred megabytes (assuming you have rules that prevent online backups etc)

Re:Can google respond in kind?

[Dayze!Confused]

I'm guessing that you don't subscribe to mailing lists. Google is great for mailing lists with the conversation feature and the ability to search old mail and being able to apply multiple labels and skip the inbox. My usage goes up by around one megabyte a day with one active mailing lists and two semi-active mailing lists. I could easily see going over a hundred megs in a month if I add a couple of mailing lists to the pool.

Re:Can google respond in kind?

[sqrt(2)]

I was playing with my Gmail account and it seems that as long as you rename the file to something other than .rar (or whatever archive type you use) you can upload and retrieve the file just fine. WinRAR allows you to brake up archives into parts, so you make a few dozen 10mb chunks, rename to .xyz and store the file on gmail. Someone will probably make a small program to automate all of this after gmail is available to the general public.

Great!

[BluRBD!E]

No I can save ALL of my spam... instead of the daily gigabytes worth.

Next big thing.

[Defender2000]

So storage space is no longer the big attraction, since everybody can get lots.

I bet the next big thing will be from whoever reaches the 700mb attachment limit ;)

Re:Next big thing.

[Anonymous Coward]

The next big thing will be which one is easier to use, has less intrusive ads, and perhaps, which offers the best security/authentication to minimize spam (such as sender-id).

It's what made Google popular in the first place (the ease of use, that is).

That's strange

[Guitarzan]

They haven't even upped the normal 2 meg ones yet...

Not that I'm really bothered by it, it's just always fun to see huge claims. :)

Re:That's strange

[eclectro]

They say that they are going to increase the limit on the 2 meg accounts "by the end of the summer", which gives them roughly a month until the first day of fall before I can call them a liar.

I suspect they are dragging their feet to squeeze all the upgrade money they can from the 2 meg accounts.

Also, I'm sure that there will be major strings attached, like having to sign in to your account every three weeks or lose it.

Alternatively, they may be dragging their feet because there are serious technical issues at hand, like with everybody letting their accounts fill with spam, which means they have will actually have to deliver tera/petabytes of storage.

The only thing I use my hotmail account for is for when people get really pushy for an email, I give them my hotmail address.

But I agree with an earlier poster, I don't need 2 gigs. Just deliver on 15 megs.

Unlimited

[neilmoore67]

Some of the storage space figures being bandied around are so outlandish that it wouldn't surprise me if someone trumps them all by offering free unlimited storage space (perhaps they already have).

They can always boot people from the service if they use too much space anyway. :-)

Re:Unlimited

[RAMMS EIN]

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.

GMX offers 1GB free and 8GB for paying customers

[Anonymous Coward]

Webinterface, POP3/SMTP, server-side filtering and forwarding included.

Good business

[pubjames]

Microsoft paid, what, $400 million for Hotmail. Then they must have paid quite a bit to port the back end to Windows. Now they are going to have increase the hardware of the back end considerably to compete with Gmail. And it's a free service.

Is that good business?

Re:Good business

[CharonIDRONES]

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

Re:Good business

[CdBee]

They're probably terrified that Google Gmail will become a universal sign-in system to compete with MSN Passport - which, after all, is the real business reason to get people onto Hotmail.

Microsoft wants to control Online Identity services and Instant Messaging. Google has the ability to be a significant threat to that if they decide to enter the market. (I'm hoping they will)

Re:Good business

[eclectro]

They're probably terrified that Google Gmail will become a universal sign-in system to compete with MSN Passport - which, after all, is the real business reason to get people onto Hotmail

Agreed. Also there is all that "life is better with the butterfly" crap that they have to try and justify.

Re:Good business

[Jade E. 2]

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?

Re:Good business

[Anonymous Coward]

it was freebsd actually

Re:Good business

[Anonymous Coward]

AFAIK, the front end web servers were moved from FreeBSD/Apache to IIS, you're right (See here), but the backend was, and could still be, Solaris. (See parent poster's references.)

I'll believe it when I see it

[pedestrian crossing]

So far, it seems like it is all rumors.

First we heard that they were going to up to 250MB. Hasn't happened yet. Now 2GB. I'm not holding my breath.

If Hotmail would actually filter spam, and do something about the headache-inducing interface, -that- would be an improvement. Thank goodness for gotmail!

Re:I'll believe it when I see it

[RogueProtoKol]

Of course there's a reduction in spam, it's a brand new account!

Re:I'll believe it when I see it

[Laser Dan]

Hotmail filter spam??! They SEND spam!
I got a hotmail account to use MSN, I have never used it but its full of spam anyway. Expected with hotmail really.
What really pissed me off though was getting an official hotmail message with ads for ING, SEEK, Virgin credit card, some Xbox game, and down the side are instructions for blocking spam: " Ensure you are protected against unsolicited e-mail by setting up your junk e-mail filters. Follow these simple instructions...blah"

What's even more hypocritical is down the bottom of the email it says "As an MSN Hotmail member, you have received this e-mail to inform you of updates, changes to the MSN Hotmail service or special news and information from MSN. Our policy has always been to send e-mail messages only to announce such information, and we'll continue to honor this policy. Thank you for being an MSN Hotmail member."

I would complain to them if it would do any good, but if they were to read all their hate mail they would need a dedicated department for it!

Re:I'll believe it when I see it

[heletek]

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.

Gmail will still be better

[Jeff85]

Ahh the wonders of competition.

But Hotmail still lacks all the great features of Gmail such as labels, conversations, and keyboard shortcuts. Hotmail won't be nearly as good as Gmail is.

Re:Gmail will still be better

[jobe999]

I agree. Hotmail is going to be cluttered with ads. Microsoft needs to learn that simplicity = success.

Come on now...

[Suhas]

I wonder how choked the Hotmail Plus subscribers will be
...it's not the first time that Redmond has screwed it's customers.

Let's see,

[lucason]

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"...

Easy...

[Anonymous Coward]

... upgrade your girlfriend.

Re:Easy...

[beaverbrother]

Personally I'd like less storage space rather than more in this case.

...so?

[startled]

The coolest thing about gmail is the software itself, not the storage. It's excellent. I wish we had it at work-- no more searching for that e-mail someone sent you 6 months ago that you're sure you put in the "coding" folder-- or was it "scripting", or "ai", or "todo"? You could always use that global e-mail search function that only takes about 20 minutes. But hey, you're too busy slogging through tons of other e-mail you just got, because your filters suck.

I don't see why I'd WANT to keep 2 gigs on my hotmail account, unless they make it as full-featured and easy to use as gmail.

Re:...so?

[R.Caley]

no more searching for that e-mail someone sent you 6 months ago that you're sure you put in the "coding" folder-- or was it "scripting", or "ai", or "todo"?

Gee guys, whatever happened to grep?

Re:...so?

[trout_fish]

C:\WINDOWS\system32>grep
'grep' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

Email! The next kazaa!

[Moocowsia]

Well now with all the spam going around we can start using free email accounts as our next p2p app. Yay!

Couple a megachips...

[lilmikey1982]

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.

now it comes to the point -

[teemu.s]

Whos more evil? The Devil whos heading towards World OS Domination or the Devil who wants to provide you personalized ads by reading your mail ...

It's not just about storage size

[Dayze!Confused]

The storage isn't the biggest reason why I love gmail so much, it's the features that it brings with it. The ability to search through my mail, the technique of orginization using labels, the conversations being kept together and easy to read. Doing active development and being active on mailing lists gets a lot easier when I can click on a conversation, read the last six emails in that thread and get up to speed on what the problem is. Hotmail may go to 2GB, but that's nothing without all the other features that gmail offers.

Size matters, but it's not everything

[Jugalator]

In my opinion, 1 GB is already so much that other features matter when I decide what mail service to use. It's not like a 10 GB mail service is 5x better than a 2 GB one. And it's not like this change would make Hotmail twice as good as Gmail.

I'm not saying this just because I like Gmail, since I *would* consider another service if Gmail just offered 20 MB while another offered 1 GB. It's just that these storage spaces are no longer an issue for me at 1 GB.

More like the opposite -- risking having so much mail and suddenly something bad happens to the online service.

Re:Size matters, but it's not everything

[dn15]

"Size matters, but it's not everything"

True, but you're probably not the average computer user. The average user will look at it and see the 2 GB mailbox size without regard to the fact that it has the (IMHO) not-so-great Hotmail interface.

It's aimed at the same people who want a 3.5 GHz computer for $299 but don't care that it runs Windows instead of Linux or Mac OS X.

Re:Size matters, but it's not everything

[PatrickThomson]

Exactly... Most consumers focus on the one feature that drives the market and is pushed out of proportion to real usefulness, to adopt a "bigger than yours" approach (Case in point: celerons. if AMD came out with a chip that ran at 4 GHz but was shit everywhere else, and found a major supplier, they'd dominate the market overnight).

Gmail took the two-pronged approach to rope people in initially with the large space, but got them completely astounded by the awesome interface.

Not Free

[peterpi]

This applies only to the Hotmail Plus service, which is not free.

Re:Not Free

[GoofyBoy]

Paid Hotmail = 2 gigs (now)
Free Hotmail = 250 Megs (in fall)

http://news.com.com/Hotmail+to+offer+250MB+of+free +storage/2100-1032_3-5245523.html?tag=nl

Blurb wrong...

[Cyno01]

They are increasing their limit for the free subscribers, but to 250MB. Hotmail plus or whatever, which is like $10 a year, gets the 2GB bump.

What devil?

[pedestrian crossing]

I guess it is about equal with the devil that "reads your email" to determine whether or not it is spam. The personalized ads thingy is probably just an add-on module to their spam filter. Two faces of the same program. Nothing to see here, move along...

The "free" accounts do NOT get 2GB!

[LinuxKnight]

RTFA... misleading /. headings strike again...

Reading the deeper linked article from the top linked article, which is: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17949/ It does not specifically mention the "free" snotmail account gets 2GB.

Reading M$N's page about it, http://www.imagine-msn.com/hotmail/en-us/ it looks like the M$N Plus accounts will get 2GB, which means the ones you pay $19.95/mo for. This is NOT the free snotmail account getting 2GB. These will get 250MB. Not GB, MB.

Jeez the /. editors need to do a little more fact checking eh? But /. editors actually RTFA??? Naaaahhhhh.

Google is still ahead in the actual FREE email storage space war. 100MB for Yahoo, 250MB for M$N. ... so, anyone got gmail beta invites? ;)

Re:The "free" accounts do NOT get 2GB!

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading M$N's page about it, http://www.imagine-msn.com/hotmail/en-us/ it looks like the M$N Plus accounts will get 2GB, which means the ones you pay $19.95/mo for.

Hotmail Plus costs $19.95/YEAR, not $19.95/month.

Jeez the /. editors need to do a little more fact checking eh? But /. editors actually RTFA??? Naaaahhhhh.

You go first.

No problem.

[cablepokerface]

Since you are posting on /. your girlfriend problem must be hypothetical.

Missing the point

[iamdrscience]

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.

A note from Microsoft.

[iamdrscience]

Dear Hotmail Users,

I.O.U. 1,998 Megabytes.

Sincerely,
William H. Gates

Re:A note from Microsoft.

[SEE]

Cheapskate. You could at least have made the IOU for 2,046 megabytes . . .

2GB doesn't solve Hotmail's problems

[TheFairElf]

Hotmail is possibly the worst of the major email providers right now. Which other email provider occasionally gives you the message "service unavailable, try again later"? I started moving away from hotmail after the time I desperately needed to get to an email and it would continuously give me this message. My other peeve with Hotmail is that the junk mail folder counts towards the measly 2MB, so most of the time my mailbox is overflowing. Even if they give 2GB of space (when they do give it), I'm still moving away from them. Yahoo and GMail are definitely better alternatives.

MS/Hotmail missing the point.

[digital photo]

I think adding more space is missing the point.

Improving the user interface, fulfilling promisses to the userbase, and making the process of web-email more straightforward should be their focus. Not supersizing their accounts.

Taking a look at the hotmail site, I am reminded of college bulletin boards where advertisements and flyers are stapled to the wall haphazardly, each trying to grab your attention when all you really wanted to find was that note your friend left you on the board.

Google's Gmail is the information frontdesk at a five star hotel where you walk by, ask if you have any messages, and get on with your life.

If MS/Hotmail is just throwing space/money at the problem, then they are missing the point entirely and will just be wasting money. Not that that's stopped them before or that that seems to matter to them much.

Microsoft miss the point

[delomelas]

But Microsoft have of course completely missed the point - it sure is nice to have a lot of storage space, but where GMail really wins is in ease of use and speediness of the site...

Filtering that is like not filtering

[pedestrian crossing]

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.

Idiot

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't mod in a thread you've posted in.

you can see it

[Suchetha]

i got 250MB in my hotmail inbox RIGHT NOW

if you email me or something i'll mail you a screenshot

cheers

Suchetha

Charset support

[erikdalen]

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 :)

The "free" accounts do NOT get 250MB!

[pedestrian crossing]

I just logged into my Hotmail account directly (I rarely do this any more, thanks to this), and found that my mail limit was upped from a paltry 1MB to a whopping 2MB!

Seems like there is a kind of "reverse FUD" thing going on here...

Free German service has better than that...

[killbill!]

GMX, a German ISP and free e-mail service, is offering 1GB for free. Bump that to 5GB for 3 EUR/month or 10GB for 5 EUR/month.

However the fun doesn't end here, as they also offer automatic POP/IMAP e-mail retrieval, custom filters for automatic redirection, SMS/MMS alerts, up to 15 aliases...

Oh, and did I mention you can use your capacity as an iDisk-like network disk and share your files with other GMX members? I think they even have a Windows plug-in to mount your storage account as a network drive in the Explorer.

Alas, AFAIK it's in German only. I for one, welcome our new German overlords...

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Do It Yourself...

[pandrijeczko]

1. Linux/BSD server connected to your broadband link.

2. Dynamic DNS service on your IP address from your ISP.

3. Procmail & fetchmail grabbing mail from the ISP mail server.

4. Strong firewall rules & SSH-only access with public & private keys.

5. Carry around your private key with Putty on a USB memory stick and / or a floppy disk.

I have 160GB of storage and can get to my email form just about any PC in the world. Plus I haven't got to worry about "yet another email account".

Re:Do It Yourself...

[stud9920]

Maybe in you alternate universe, PC fans are noiseless.

Maybe in you alternate universe, it is OK to spend tens (hundreds ?) of Watts to power an otherwise useless machine.

Re:Do It Yourself...

[pandrijeczko]

Maybe in you alternate universe, it is OK to spend tens (hundreds ?) of Watts to power an otherwise useless machine.

So you're obviously that "green" a person that when you get up from the TV at night to go to the toilet, you turn off the TV and light in your sitting room, go to the toilet, come back and turn them both on agian before sitting down, do you? Plus you must use low wattage light bulbs throughout your house and you cannot use a microwave oven because it is far more energy efficient to cook all of you food "en masse" in a large gas oven. Do that, then you have a right to complain about my server wasting a few hundred watts.

As to "otherwise useless", the same machine hosts a few of my web sites, acts as an SFTP server for a few of my buddies to use, occasionally gets fired up as a Doom, Unreal Tournament or Quake server, handles about a dozen email accounts shared between my girlfriend and I, acts as a syslog server to the rest of my home network and has a firewall on it also.

Re:Do It Yourself...

[stud9920]

Let's sum it up :

* turning my TV on and off for such a short time significantly shortens the MTBF of the components, and is therefore environmentally nefast.
* I do use low wattage bulbs, for the reason that I have a low amount of current available, so if I wat to see something, I have to use mini-TLs; plus they're cheaper on the long run.
* I do not have a microwave oven because it's far to easy to heat junk food with one.

Is this even true? Where is the announcement?

[tod_miller]

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 /.

Re:Missing the point--try reading Gmail offline

[blastedtokyo]

Mine's up to 250MB...and it's been like that for about 3 weeks now. Guess they have a lot of servers to update.

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!

Yahoo silent player

[vivekg]

Does anyone noticed that prices reduced for Yahoo biz mail http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/bzinfo/prod/bemail/ compare_mail_packages.php and Yahoo web hosting http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/bzinfo/prod/wh/comp are.php, which includes tons of space ($11.99 pm == 25 EMAIL ID [ 2 GB each], 2 GB hosting space, and other stuff). Wow they are ahead of every one
Many services now crossing 1 gig mark, (http://fearside.org/~vivekgite/gmail-watch/ look right side Bigger the better - MailBox); EAST or WEST gmail is best of free email, but for "Small Business" yahoo rocks.

It will be in the next version, then delayed

[SmallFurryCreature]

Welcome to MS marketing my friend. MS always does this. Don't switch, don't buy something else, don't go to the competitor. We will have it all in the next version and MORE!!! Then the next version comes close to release and most of it will have been delayed into the next version.

The older people will remember MS promising the sky to stop people from adopting OS/2 and the younger can look to Longhorn. Not even close to release yet and it is already being stripped and things MS promised to be in XP but really where in Longhorn are now definitly going to be in "who cares". WinFS anyone? How long has MS been promising a better filesystem?

This little announcement grabbed MS a few headlines. None of the media will be coming back to MS in a few weeks and ask them why they haven't delivered. Journalists ain't even smart enough to question goverments on breaking campaign promises. Far easier to copy paste the next press release.

"Hotmail Means to Double Gmail Storage"

[jonasw]

I'm sure Gmail will be very grateful.

Not for free....

[kg4czo]

Just checked my pam ridden hotmail account that I've had since before M$ bought it and they're actually offering 250MB to freeloaders. The 2GB is for paying customers.

Yay! 250MB of SPAM to delete every day! :P

Don't you love corporate thinking?

[zaxios]

"Gmail looks like it might become popular!"

"Oh, that's no problem. Gmail's got 1GB, we'll respond in kind and give all those bastards TWICE as much!"

"Wow, Johnny, if 1GB is good, imagine how neato 2GB would be!"

Talk about linear thought. Google does something new, so Hotmail's solution is to replicate that something new + 1 (except entirely without the newness). And of course they leave out in their plans all the things more complicated for committees to understand, like Gmail's improved usability. "Google has 1GB!" is probably as much they could grasp of the situation, because it's certainly all they've responded to.

Thank you Google!

[uberchicken]

I love it. Google pilot a big-box email beta system, and we all get 2Gb Hotmail.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Google of Sherwood.

Re:Regular e-mail

[dn15]

" I have all the backup e-mail storage space I want on my own Personal Computer. How many people honestly need instant access to an old e-mail from two years ago from anywhere on the web?"

Quite true in many cases, but there are good reasons for using webmail (combined with IMAP, if possible!) It is great to have consistent layout of saved mailboxes available on multiple computers, for example. It's also nice to have saved messages available when out of town, if you don't use a laptop. Finally, your address stays the same if you switch ISPs, and even keeps working if you don't have any internet service for a while.

That said, I would not use a web-only mail service myself. I'm just saying there are uses for it. Personally I have my own domain name, set up with IMAP and SquirrelMail pointed at it -- all the advantages of webmail without the annoyances.

Microsoft FUD as usual

[stu72]

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?

Big deal

[t_allardyce]

Hotmail is big, fat, slow and bloated i only use it because i still get emails there, my 2MB of space is always full and waiting for it all to load if im on a slow connection or pc is just torture. Gmail is super fast, efficiently designed and a pleasure to use. Hotmail could offer 100GB and Gmail would still be in the hearts of many, even so with all the money going into google right now they could probably keep their space higher than Hotmails for a long time..

Maybe then I could FINALLY find...

[timek]

... a penile enhancement product the truly performs wonders,

... a former minister of a third world company who really needs my help moving millions out of his country,

... a home mortgage rate that is too good to be found at my bank,

... prescription Viagra for next to nothing,

... singles in my area who will put out on the first date for a coke and hamburger,

... and all of the amazing products that are too revolutionary to find except through unsolicited electronic communications.

"service unavailable, try again later"

[cascadingstylesheet]

Which other email provider occasionally gives you the message "service unavailable, try again later"?

Well, GMail, sometimes. But it's still good enough that I don't care :)

Of course!

[Ilgaz]

They got DoubleSpace installed on Hotmail servers! They just lack a bit conventional memory, thats all...

Phear MS technology you Google!

It's not all about storage!

[jbarr]

Gmail is certainly not all about storage. It's about the Search, Labels, Conversation, and lightning-fast interface leveraging that storage space that lets me manage my email in ways I never could before. I have yet to find a (free) Web-based email service offers the speed and flexibility in managing my emails that Gmail does. I have emails dating back to 1998, and Gmail lets me find the information I need quickly. And Gmail's ads are non-intrusive and often useful. Hotmail could provide a terabyte of storage, but the intrusive, flashy ads make the experience nothing short of annoying. Even if Gamil charged for their service, I'd pay for it because of its functionality. It truely is in "the Google way".

Re:Billy made a comment like yours some time ago.

[plumby]

Seems unlikely. I'm guessing their business case for Hotmail is at least partly based on advertising revenue, and this is usually largely dependent on number of (independently verified) page hits, so the more you use them, the more demand they get for (and the more they can charge for) advertising space.

Cost of disk space vs. cost of engineering & m

[otisg]

Precisely. You can think about it like this:

Disk space is cheap. When you give users 2GB of disk space, they don't really use it all up. The disk space is not pre-allocated and immediately consumed. Thus, 2GB is really more about users' perception of Hotmail's offering, and this positive perception comes at a low price (again: disk space is cheap)

On the other hand, it costs a lot to pay a few dozen developers to add valuable, innovative new features, such as GMail's labels.
It also costs a lot of money to market Hotmail, to evangelize and to hype it, which is what people are doing with/for GMail for 'free'.

In conclusion, it's easy and not that expensive to just throw 'we offer 2GB' on the site, but it is expensive to add features and market the service.

Not even 100MB - 15MB!

[wirefarm]

Yes, .Mac comes with 100MB of online storage, but you can only use 15 of that for mail.

I have a .Mac account that cost me 13,900 yen per year and unless they up that to at *least* 1GB by renewal time, I won't be renewing.

Yes, it includes other things, like a virus checker. WTF?
I don't need a WebDav server for files - I use Samba over an SSH tunnel to my home server. It's a lot faster and more convenient.
The other things they offer, like game trials and discounts on magazines really strike me as the kind of thing I could get for free if I dug around.

I just wrote them a note to let them know how I feel about it:

Hi.
My .mac account is up for renewal soon and I don't think I'll be renewing it.
The quality of the service has been great, but simply put, 15MB is too little storage for email.
I have little use for the other 85MB of storage, except for occasionally putting up a .mov or .mp3 that I create. I tend to feel resentful when I get that "over quota" message on my email, when I have paid for other storage that I cannot use as I like.
For $99 a year, it really should be something like 5-10GB.

Thanks,

Jim
http://www.wirefarm.com

Ebay's telephone numbers

[Alien54]

I don't know I did a search on google for ebay telephone numbers, and found this:

Ebay's telephone numbers

Ebay Phone Numbers:

(408) 558-7400
(408) 558-7401
1-800-322-9266
1-888-749-3229
1-408-37 6-6554 FAX

Spokesperson: Kevin Pursglove, 408-558-7458
Hours: 7:30AM - 5:30PM PT M-F

Employee's Extension: press 1
Dial by name directory: press 0
Customer Service: press 2
Operator: press 3

May be dated, obsolete, your milage may vary, you have been warned.

Woo hoo! Even MORE sucky service!!!

[swordgeek]

Welcome to the supersized nation. It doesn't matter if it's bad service, just as long as it's BIG!

Hotmail went steeply downhill after MS bought them, and has never recovered. There are better and more respected services out there. Who CARES how much storage they'll give you?

Re:I wouldn't know.

[1u3hr]

Send me an Gmail invite,

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.

Re:Billy made a comment like yours some time ago.

[Igmuth]

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!"

only cost hotmail $0.50

[peter303]

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.

2MB now versus 1GB when??

[clickety6]

The big advantage to me is that I can get a hotmail account or two right now - I can't get a Gmail account. And that's the same for 1000's of other users.

So right now, a 2Mb free hotmail account is much more atractive to me than a 1Gb but-you-can't have-one-yet Gmail account !

Why Then?

[LuYu]

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).

Oh come on...

[tropavantgarde]

Past a certain point, upping your storage does slim-to-nothing as far as competition goes. Maybe a few people will go, "Oh cool! I can store 2 gb! That sounds really cool!" But very few people will even come close to gmail's 1 gb limit, let alone 2 gb.

Moreover, Hotmail doesn't even begin to compete with gmail as far as the interface, searchability options, multiple labels, &c go.

Nice try, MS.

It just doesn't matter anymore.

[nikolic]

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.

Not fully true

[doublej42]

OK first of all I am a Level 3 tech at MSN. So this is kind of the official line. MSN/Hotmail is nto plannign on giveing there customers 2gb of mail, Well it is but not for free. MSN has already given them 2gb. As for interface, 9.95 per month they made there own e-mail software (ya it's outlook but built for hotmail accounts) and no I'm not selling it. Won't run on linux anyways. but ya hotmail may suck but hell its' free live with it, it will be 250 mb by January. Signed your friendly MSN guy http://join.msn.com/?pgmarket=en-us&page=hotmail/e s&HL=MSN_Hotmail_Plus&ST=1&RU=http%3a%2f%2fjoin.ms n.com%2f%3fpage%3dmisc%2fspecialoffers%26pgmarket% 3den-us