The Hindu : Coming: Google mail

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Apr 03, 2004

National

National

Coming: Google mail

By G. Ananthakrishnan

CHENNAI, APRIL 2. Hotmail launched a web-based e-mail revolution in 1996. Now, `Gmail' promises to transport it to a different plane. The search engine leader Google on Thursday announced its free e-mail service with several firsts: an unprecedented 1 GB (gigabyte) of storage space for each account, facility to search through thousands of mails in each and "sophisticated" protection against spam.

With its foray into e-mail, Google will move into the stronghold of Yahoo! and Hotmail, who in turn have been working to improve their search engine capabilities.

Google's proposed service is being viewed as one of the more significant developments in the e-mail market in several years. It has created excitement among Yahoo! and Hotmail subscribers who have to make do with 4 MB (megabytes) and 2 MB of space in the free service: with the 1,000 MB offered by Gmail, it would be possible to store thousands of mails.

Gmail also enables bigger-size attachments to be sent. The market leader Hotmail, with a share of 37 per cent, and Yahoo! with 30 per cent, allow only 1 MB and 1.5 MB attachments for free accounts; Gmail will allow 10 MB. This would make Gmail an immediate choice among broadband users constrained by file size limits.

The new service could attract lakhs of webmail users and many of the estimated 40 lakh Internet subscribers in India who use client-based e-mail. The cramped mailboxes provided by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) — typically 5 MB storage — are routinely clogged by spam. For those who opt for Gmail, the trade-off is not obtrusive pop-up or banner advertisements but text advertisements placed in incoming mail, based on some key words picked out from mail contents. These are generated by automated search technology made famous by Google.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

National