Web-Based E-Mail Showdown!

Old news... "Last modified: May 13, 2004, 2:53 PM PDT"

The current competition is almost over, as companies are daring to put out 2GB of storage (AventureMail), even more, and then unlimited. The following competition, which I feel will start up before the end of the year, will be free websites up to about as much as the current email providers are doing. Of course, not unlimited, but the competition might start at 100MB of free, then zoom up to 1GB for free, and eventually 2GB, 3GB, 4GB and 5GB for free. With that will come free bandwidth limitation increases, from 1GB/month to 10GB/month etc. Should be interesting to see what the year 2005 has in store for hosting.

Anyways, I digressed, I know. But enjoy the email competition while it lasts, as free email storage spaces are considerably larger (40x larger in some cases) than free hosting.

 

I was quite surprised to see my basic Yahoo account jump up to 100MB as well! It was unexpected, but much appreciated, news. I think Yahoo is one of the first of the "old-school" free email providers to increase storage space as Hotmail, Lycos, Excite, and others are still at their relatively paltry 3-5MB storage. You'd only find 100MB-2GB space on one of those newer providers, or if you pay for it.

I don't think it's much of a money loser for the free email providers anymore, at least according to this Forbes article. With hard drive storage as low as $1/GB (as opposed to $10/GB 3 years ago), it's the same expense for Yahoo, Hotmail, and the like.

Consequently, even though I have been trying to get some use out of my Gmail account, I'm likely to stick with my Yahoo account. I've had the Yahoo address for a long time and I think there's less of a chance for the company to go under and render my email useless.

 

Between google and yahoo, the latter is the one that's unstable. Google has done nothing but grow, expand, and gain users. Yahoo has uh... exactly the opposite.

OK, maybe i'm just pissed that you got a gmail account and don't even like it

paul

 

You're kidding, right? Google is nowhere near going under. You're talking about the company that revolutionized the search engine industry.

 

Correct if I'm wrong on either account but:
[1] Altavista also had an email service that unfortunately got shut down in 2001.
[2] They were also one of the first to provide free online email.

And Hotmail is only 2MB and full of overbloated software and advertising crap. I do not recommend Hotmail do anyone anymore, especially since I let the Hotmail staff remove my account after 90 days of nonusage.

 

Yahoo may seem more unstable, but then again, they also have more users at this point. By the way, I'm not saying I don't like it, I just meant I wasn't planning to switch everything over to the Gmail account just yet.

 

I guess I was too vague. What I was inferring was other no-name email companies that you wouldn't be sure if they were gonna be around after 3 or 5 years.

 

*shrug*

I let my altavista email account die out a long, long time ago. And yes, I would agree with you about Hotmail. If I had to rank all of the free email providors out there, it would be at the bottom (if not *the* bottom) of the list.

 

Can somebody explain to me why this scares people? Google also reads these forums. They also read what you search on via google. I'm sure there's much much more... like... anysite that doesn't have their robots.txt excluding google.

It's a program that looks at the content of your e-mail and gives text ads based on the content. I'd much prefer if my buddy and I are talking about tropical fish to have text ads for tropical fish than to have an ad (in my Hotmail) for AdultFriendFinder and the ability to hire Oprahs trainer for $3 a day.

I really don't get what people are so freaked about.

 

It's more the fact that google is able to read any of your email. The fact it reads this forum is fine because a forum is a public place. Your email is private, and ment to only be shown to who you want. Google reading it and putting adds in it is a violation of privacy to some people. It's actually a huge controversy.

That being said. I will use Gmail when it comes out.

 

The Hotmail/Yahoo!/excite/insert your mail provider here is (most likely) able to read your e-mail too. In fact, one could argue that (we'll go with Hotmail as our example) that a program that Microsoft owns reads your Hotmail. How else can it display it on the webpage? E-Mail is only as secure as we pretend it to be. The google staff is not actually reading your e-mail and if they are, there is just as much chance that the Hotmail staff is too. I guess I'm just not seeing the difference...

I'm certainly not attacking you MrSugar. I'm just not getting it in my head the right way maybe...