The GMail Wars: Hotmail to Increase Mailbox Storage

HardwareGeeks.com – Hotmail to Increase Mailbox Storage – Page 1
Last week, Yahoo announced its 100MB mailbox storage for free accounts and 2GB storage for Mail Plus subscribers. Today, Hotmail confirmed that it will also increase the storage space for its mailbox accounts.

I hate to tell them (okay, no I don’t), but Gmail is still going to wipe the floor with them and, if there is a GMail business plan, probably Outlook as well. It’s incredible. I don’t have enough mail to really get a handle on things like what speed it will have with a couple hundred megabytes of email, but the label system beats hell out of folders, the archive system is great and the search feature is terrific. The labels allow you to classify an email by multiple categories instead of putting it in just one folder. So a single email might be labeled as “family”, “Mom” and “vacation”, for example. Or, if they come out with a paid plan for businesses, you could label one email by type of client, client name, geography and “VIP” status.

On the revenue side, The Google text ads are much more pleasant than the graphic ads on Yahoo and MSN. Especially compared to Yahoo which has taken to doing lots of Java or Flash animated ads that really bog things down. I click on Google’s text ads and occasionally buy something. With the animated ads, I usually just refresh the screen or click to another screen to escape it. With Zone Alarm pro now offering a feature to screen out animated and banner ads, text ads have one more thing going for them. I’ll also state for the record that I like the fact that the ads are relevant to whatever I’m reading. Some of them at this point aren’t even ads, they are pointers to Google news features relevant to the email. Hopefully they’ll keep some of those interspersed in there.

The terms of use on the free service are that it’s for personal use. If they intend to keep that, they’re going to have a huge demand to offer a paid service for business use (hopefully with a domain name branding capability). Once people get a dose of the ease of use of this system in personal email, they will want it for business email. Every aspect of it is an order of magnitude improvement over even the likes of Eudora Pro and Thunderbird.

For those who want it, my gmail address is my firstname and lastname as one word with no punctuation @ gmail . com .