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The Webmail Wars
latif writes "Much of the excitement around Gmail has centered around its innovative
interface, but a pretty interface is hardly Gmail's biggest contribution.
Gmail's real contribution to webmail is its innovative business model. The new
business model is what's allowing Gmail to offer 1 GB storage quotas, and still have an expectation of making money. Of
course, Microsoft and Yahoo have noticed this too, and one can reasonably expect them to move
their webmail services to the new model. An interesting battle is shaping up
between the big three webmail providers, and my article "The Webmail Wars" analyzes
some possible scenarios and outcomes."
As I have previously mentioned on tech-recipes, I honestly don't see how there is a real war between these webmail services.
Gmail kills them all in spam blocking and space...
Plus, now... they have free pop as well.
The privacy issue is the only thing that has been preventing my complete switch over.
Back in the days when HoTMaiL was the only webmail, it was good... Then MS bought them out and they turned to shit.
My webhost gives me e-mail addresses. I just use them. I do have a gmail addy and it's nice. XD;
Moll.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
gmail supporst non-western characters I just found out. Yahoo does not(despite the fact that yahoo.co.jp for example does). Something to think about in an increasingly interconnected world.
Monstar L
There are many other factors too..
Due to the nature of hotmail and yahoo, and the lack of searching, even deleting 50 emails is difficult. Even worse, the spam detection on hotmail is very unreliable (about 50-75% accurate), meaning its very difficult to manage emails.
The 200megs storage limit on hotmail can hold about 4000 emails, and since its difficult to handle even 50, I'd hate to leave my inbox unattended for a week.
Overall, the reason gmail is succeeding isn't just the business plan, but the features make it more usable then hotmail or yahoo. In my opinion though, yahoo is still doing a much better job then hotmail, with its features.
Having a hotmail account has no real benefits (it has the smaller space, you can get a passport without a hotmail account, they tend to get very spammy, and theres no "hotmail groups" which needs a hotmail account to sign up) and because of all the email addresses, its very hard to end up with a remotely decent email on it. Gmail has started to suffer the same problem, but I severely doubt it will ever suffer it as bad as hotmail or yahoo (yahoo for instance has different domains such as auzy@yahoo.com will accept the same emails as auzy@yahoo.co.uk, but someone might not realise it and sign up for both with different ID's, halving the total domains).
Its not just about advertising, its about the usage. Everyone has a hotmail account they leave around for junk.. Which means that they are just gathering emails at the moment costing Microsoft in Bandwidth costs.
From Oddpost's Oddblog back in July:
"May we please pay you $75 for the simple privelege of watching you use Oddpost for about an hour and a half? Yahoo! is conducting an Oddpost usability study at their headquarters in Sunnyvale, CA."
Watch for Yahoo! mail changes coming soon...
So, Google is using their software to match search keywords to ads on email to, and suddenly that's a "business model"? No of course not, it's a way to get more klick-throughs. It is an *improvement*. Nobody claimes a new "business model" because they have built a better mousetrap.
A business model is rather from where you get revenues, or how you are organised. I get my money from consulting, and the software I'm building is free. Microsoft charges for their software. THAT is different business models.
Why do I use webmail:
a) I can access it anywhere.
b) It's free.
c) It doesn't change when I change ISP.
d) It's backed-up properly by a commercial vendor, which is better than I can offer myself.
e) Spam filtering is generally great.
f) POP3 boxes are usually 30mb, which will fill in a week. Gmail is 1gig, that'll fill in a year.
Personally, I use addresses at my own domain, and just foward the whole lot to gmail. Works a treat, and if gmail fails I'll just forward to my POP3 box again..
I remain disappointed with gmail.
It still won't open messages in a new window. Is it so unnatural to want to view the message index in one window and open the messages in new windows while retaining my view of the index? I mean, some of us can chew gum and walk at the same time.
On Yahoo, I can do this simply by middle clicking links. Not on gmail. Javascript and frames hell prevent it. As if that makes it "okay".
I still can't find an option to get a traditional chronological view of my inbox. Gmail only seems to provide their threaded view. Many times, that view is not optimal.
No folders. They do not support folders. Sure, they support filters. But I can't use a filter to put mail from a mailing list into a folder. This is good how? What alternative to folders are they providing?
No option to show full headers by default.
5% of the time, gmail says it is unavail when I try and login. A retry gets me in.
It is great as an inbox for registering accounts, etc. But aside for the benefit of the 1GB causing everyone else to raise their quotas, it ain't that great.
Whenever I sign up a non-technical user for a web mail account (so I don't have re-setup Outlook and hear how they lost all their email everytime their hard drive crashes), I always sign them up for a Yahoo account. Hotmail just plain sucks because they open links in email in a frame. Come on now - they've had that "feature" in there for years. When are they going to get rid of it? I thought when MS modified IE so that it didn't accept cookies in a frame they would HAVE to do it but apparently they didn't agree with me. As a result, clicking on links contained within a Hotmail message is useless.
On the other hand, GMail is really nice. Part of the UI though I'm still up in the air as to whether it's more difficult for me to use because I'm not used to it or because it's just plain not better. For instance, I sent an email to approximately 40 people from my Gmail account and received a single response from just about all of them. Well all of those responses are lumped into a single unit called a conversation that I find very difficult to navigate/cleanup/etc. I know that's the point - that I'm never supposed to delete anything, but I think actually hitting that "ideal" might be counterproductive. So, I stick with Yahoo - especially since they added the ability to login using SSL. Can you believe for years you had to login with your password in plaintext!! And even now the "Standard" login is plaintext - you have to click on "Secure" mode to make sure nobody gets your login and password.
I'm a big tall mofo.
I have no affiliation other than being a happy customer.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
GMX anybody? 1000 MB free space for e-mail, POP3 access and WebDav (Windows: Web Folder) access to use that gigabyte to store files you want to access everywhere?
"The primary reason google 'scanning my email' doesnt concern me is that google has a reputation for being honest."
That reputation may not be well earned, somoene reported that his Gmail account was cancelled because he had warez in it. While copyright infringement is illegal, I don't want any of my service providers scanning stuff for illegal activity without a good reason.
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
when its in perpetual beta, and 'normal humans' can't get an account?
how long has the beta been already? long enuf for M$ an Yoohoo to actually provide services, right?
That has to be one of the best ideas I've read on Slashdot in a long time. Congratulations.
By the way, indexing email attachments is very simple, just do it like a P2P network would: compute a hash on the attachment, store it along with the attachment's size and check for matches.
Someone might complain about the possibility of collisions under this scheme. Now if a secure hash function were used (not MD5 as it has been broken) then the system would be, for all practical purposes, shielded from collisions: even a smallish 128-bit hash would require approx. 2^64 different attachments to be present in the system, before the probability of finding a collision by the birthday paradox would be non-negligible.
This is an unthinkable amount of messages -- even if all 6 billion people on earth were to send 10 messages a day, each with different attachments, it would take almost a million years before Google would need to worry about collisions. But of course they could check the size of attachments before declaring a match, making it even harder to find collisions (as if it wasn't hard enough). The statistical distribution of message attachment sizes is hard to predict, but it would easily add another few orders of magnitude to the amount of messages required to produce a collision.
Join the NFSNET. Our prime goal is making little numbers out of big ones. http://www.nfsnet.org/
I was one of the "lucky" ones that had a 6 Mb Yahoo mail account (it was later trimmed down to... 4 Mb?) since I've had it for like 6 years.
6 years. But then Goggle comes and in a matter of days my account is upgraded to 100 Mb. They couldn't really afford to do that for the last 6 years, yet as soon as a competitor shows up they start offering upgrades.
Well, too bad, I'm going to Gmail and their targeted ads and I feel no remorse leaving behind Yahoo and their sucktastic advertising.
---- Take the Space Quiz!
So now not only will my Hotmail account get lots of spam, I'll also get to see banner ads proclaiming the virtues of V|4gr4...
In fact, this is almost precisely how they do it. They take each incoming message, hash it, and store that hash and original message on their shards in their data management system, with a very fast lookup. Every time a new message is received or delivered, and matches an existing hash, the pointer to the original message is put into the user's mailbox. If a user deletes the message, the pointer to that message is removed from that user's mailbox.
This means if 30 people subscribe to the Linux Kernel Mailing List (notorious for being incredibly high-traffic), and 1,000 messages are received in a day.. only 1,000 messages are stored, not 30,000. This not-only saves space, but it saves mailbox lookup time and increases speed of the system overall.
Now, apply this to the spam problem. Spam email to one person (such as shopping advertisements for Sears) may not be spam to another person ("Hey, I need a new lawnmower at Sears!"). So those who mark it as spam, get the spam heuristic scoring weighted higher and applied to their incoming message hashes, and those who do not mark those same messages as spam, get a lower weighting.
The system is actually pretty brilliant.
Now, in response to the other person who claims that their 3MiB email sent to their sister and friends created copies of the message in their "Sent" folder, that makes perfect sense, because the message is different if you send it on different days or with different contents ("Hey Sally, check out these pictures!" "Here's some pictures for you, Bob."). They should be treated differently in the sending user's mailbox. But to the recipient, the attachment itself, is not getting duplicated.
The precise reason Google can offer 1GiB mailboxes for every user, is because that 1GiB is "over-provisioned" across thousands of other users, much like how an ISP oversells their own bandwidth, knowing that all their customers won't saturate the entire pipe 24x7.
Someone else must have mentioned this also, but having not seen it in the first couple pages of replies...I'll say it again.
It ISN'T the storage amount that makes Gmail great. It is the method that Gmail does web-mail in the first place.
Gmail takes the hit off the server and puts most of the process of rendering pages on the browser itself. Their use of Javascript is brilliant. Something they likely learned from Mozilla.
Who cares if Hotmail adds 98MB more storage...their rendering time will still suck. Same with Yahoo and the others.