Something was brewing in Email Land. The more.. sensitive users could feel it coming. Hotmail and Yahoo had been decreasing mailbox size slowly over the years, in order to pressure users into subscribing for their paid options. However, email usage patterns were changing.. more and more people are getting ’hooked up’ every year, and most of them can’t be bothered to learn about the joys of FTP or webstorage, and therefor will happily send their 4MB pictures (in BMP format, of course ;) ) over to all their friends and family as email attachments. Something had to give way.
Google has always been an innovating company, which quickly brought them to the first position in the search engine market. Heck, before Google was there even such a thing as a ’search market’ ? Google quickly expanded it’s empire into different areas of search, and became a dominating force. Now it’s moving onto Email with it’s Gmail service. Gmail is the first service that brought it’s users a whopping 1024 MB (1 Gigabyte) of email storage.
The reason: We don’t want you to have to delete mail. For now, Gmail is still in it’s Beta phase, with limited signups through an ’Invitation by current members’ system. However, the move made by Gmail has upped the ante for email providers across the board. Some are still considering their options and others have responded swiftly by upgrading their users mailboxes to much greater capacities as well.
Here’s a roundup of popular and not-so-popular email providers, with their new capacities. In those cases where the upgrades have not been done yet, I have indicated the time at which the upgrade will be done. This only looks at the free options, and only providers that ’have been around’. New 1GB+ email providers are popping up like mushrooms during fall, but I’ve seen too many of them fall almost as quickly as they rose to be eager to list them here.
Gmail: 1000 MB, innovative webinterface. Does not allow any form of external access to your mailbox. Serves content-based advertisements, which caused a bit of controversy due to the privacy issues. Does not support folders but a more advanced system using ’labels’. Applies the powerful Google search technology to your email. Still in limited Beta version. Use with care, known cases of mail gone missing exist.
Hotmail: Currently 2 MB, will upgrade ’sometime during fall 2004’ to 250 MB. Long time player in the email game. Is notorious for it’s horrible customer support (See if you can get a non standardized response from a Hotmail Customer Support person...), small mailbox sizes and extreme amounts of advertising. However, it’s very popular as it’s been marketed by MS as part of the Microsoft Passport, needed for a whole lot of Microsoft Network services such as the MSN Messenger. Avoid whenever you can, in my opinion.
Yahoo: 100 MB. Generally well regarded email provider. Good spam protection, bit heavy on the advertising but not as much as Hotmail. Decent customer support.
SpyMac: 1 GB of storage on their free accounts. Very much iMac-oriented, but also accessible from Windows machines. Relatively new provider, but has built up an impressive trackrecord to date. Update: Recently SpyMac has been having a lot of trouble with it’s mail, including loss of users’ mailboxes. I’d steer clear from them for a while, until they get their act back together.
BlueBottle: 250 MB of storage. BlueBottle uses a unique sender-verification system to block spam. Users say it’s a very effective system. Great customer support, they have representatives on Emaildiscussions.com (which I also frequent, drop by if you want to)
RediffMail: 1024 MB of storage. On advice of some of the Mouthshutters commenting on this review I took a look here. The login box is very easy to overlook on a very crowded portal page, filled to the brim with India-centered content. (Nothing wrong with that, but only marginally interesting for a Dutch person..). The mail account itself is fairly simple, with more functionality being available in the form of upgrades, such as POP3, which (unfortunately) cost money.
Thanks all for the comments so far, I’ve updated the list with Rediff, corrected the Gmail amount of storage (1000 MB instead of 1 GB, thanks AbDriver!) and corrected some speling mistakes ;)