I have been using email since Sabeer Bhatia started his Hotmail service. It is not so nice an experience to change your email address once your mail service starts to suck. From hotmail to gmail, web based email has come a long long way. People have started using email as email and now gmail has understood that as a concept before creating their own service.
Hotmail from then to now provides the great 2048KB of space to store your emails, which includes their junk and your trashed mails. We never used it to its full extent at that time, because email was only text, and I never knew that you could attach pictures bigger than the size of the mailbox and send ( as it would take hours to upload the picture anyway)
After this hotmail stuff came the famous till date Yahoo Mail. It gave a whooping 6 MB of space and flooded its website with ads. We started using Yahoo.
Rediffmail came in, indiatimes, 123india, netscape, mail.com and the most famous and one cannot forget usa.net(netaddress.com)
Usa.net was one great service, which everyone liked, we used it and it was the first service to change to paid, which created an instant aversion and lots of problems like changing email address for people. I would still say that it was one of the best service I have ever used. No server hang ups, no choking mails and never have I lost a mail in that.
Yahoo became ultimate provider of email and was the leading legend in mail service. From 6 MB, they came to the strategy of giving DOUBLE the space than the ’’other’’ web mail service providers and changed the new accounts to 4 MB.
Then there was news about Google coming out with a mail service by April. When you go to that website, they would ask you to register and say that they will contact once their service is on. Suddenly on a day Yahoo became 100 MB to all. I never understood why Yahoo, who was cribbing for space, and was stripping so many features suddenly gave so much space. Then I got the gmail invite through my friend to understand the real story.
Gmail, I would rather call it the Great Mail. People said it would also become slow once there are many people getting their accounts in it. But I have a very strong belief in the Sun Java Technology. Gmail loads everything before you start with your mail box.
A reply , forward, delete mail (actually there is no delete, it is only move to trash) , open mail , archive mail, label mail (like moving to folders) are all done in a flash.
A Whooping 1000 MB of space and still rediff is very happy to offer 1024 MB of space in their mail. Now that 24 MB seems smaller to us, but we should still remember that we once had only 2 MB mail space which used to get filled up with small emails.
No where can anyone compare to the interface of GMail. The only service which can be compared to the interface than GMail is the Yahoo s latest interface. But, GMail sure is improving and is taking comments from its users.
It has started giving more invites to people so that they can join. We should say, they are starting a new community of users, who are proud to have a https://m.mouthshut.com/gmail rel="nofollow" target="_blank" >@gmail in their mail address.
The concept is different and so there is no button called ’’delete’’ , there is only one called archive or if you want to delete, you better move the message to trash.
Hotmail announced that it would start giving 250MB, big news, but never happened. Microsoft is said to have announced a new search engine which is better than the best (google) and are going to release it by 2005. They predict that it is going to be the best search engine and google will loose its popularity as the front end to any user. Now Gmail gives me a stronger feeling that microsoft is no where in this competition.