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When e-mail means more mail
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There are many who argue that a few irritating ads is a small price to pay for a gigabyte of e-mail space
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REMEMBER A few years ago where industry gurus warned us that the days of free e-mail services are almost over? "There is no such thing as a free lunch," they warned grimly. Well, they might as well eat their words with their lunch, because exactly the opposite seems to be happening.
Recently, quite a few of the Net's e-mail service providers announced massive increases in the size of their e-mail offerings, both free and paid.
Microsoft, which bought the web's first e-mail service, Hotmail, from Indian Internet pioneer Sabeer Bhatia, has announced that it is going to increase the storage offered in its free service from 2.5 MB to 250 MB. It will also boost the size of attachments from 1 MB to 10 MB. The changes are expected by early July.
Yahoo, the other popular e-mail service, has increased its free storage limit from 4 MB to 100 MB. These increases are set to be pre-emptive action in response to Google's entry into the mail maidan with its G-Mail, where it promised 1,000 MB (1 GB) of free e-mail space.
Though the service was announced in April, it is still in trial phase, but the storage space of the free G-Mail was so massive that almost everyone else has had to scramble to match it.
The Google offer had some fine print, which has got privacy advocates hot and bothered. This was its announced feature of pushing advertisements to users' pages based on keywords picked up from their e-mail messages. Since the beta launch of G-Mail, Google has promised to take a second look at this feature, but there are many who argue that a few irritating ads is a small price to pay for a gigabyte of e-mail space. The Indian e-mail provider Rediff has not been sitting around idle either. On June 17, the desi portal announced that its free e-mail users would have their storage space beefed up from 5 MB to 1,000 MB, while its premium paid service would be increased to 2 GB. The single e-mail message size has also been increased 10-fold from 1 MB.
Rediff has over 25 million users and is one of the more popular among the Indian e-mail providers. If your own e-mail comes from one of these providers, you can sit back and relax, but if you are serviced by someone else, it is good to wait and watch, because this is a game of Follow the Leader. And sooner, rather than later, everyone in the e-mail business will have to say: "Good bye mega, hello giga!"
A. VISHNU
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