Ordinary Nothing

It’s pretty safe to claim that storage space for email account is no longer a selling point. Or at least shouldn’t be. Many free email providers offer paid services as well, and until not too long ago more storage space was an important part of the package. These days they have to find other things, even though some of them apparently still don’t get it.

This is all of course due to the crazy, and somewhat odd, competition by Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, and Hotmail.

The latest change was recently, when Yahoo announced their intention to raise their mailbox sizes of free email accounts to 1GB, catching up to the offer of Gmail. They did that, but not before Gmail all of a sudden increased their own size to 2GB+ . Which is nice, but at this point I expect for most people this is really rather moot.

Gmail, apparently as part of the idea of always staying ahead in this particular game, did not just raise the storage quota to 2GB, but are still increasing it all the time, following claims to keep going ad infinitum. Which is fine by me, and should be fine by anyone with a Gmail account. Even though most people will take a lot more time to get to the current quota than it will take Gmail to get a lot beyond it.

What is very annoying about this, though, is that they keep this counter of mailbox storage space on their homepage. This is maddening. Text on a page shouldn’t keep moving and changing all the time, it just shouldn’t. This is the same reason that makes the HTML <blink> tag evil.

Yahoo just completed the upgrade from 250MB to 1GB. And they passed it rather quietly. There is a What’s New link on the mail pages, but apart from that they pretty much went on like every other day. I like that. I didn’t even notice that they did the upgrade for some time. No fanfare. They did however went a little bit into the other direction, by not removing their occasional self-ad where they promote their large mailbox size of 250MB. It’s funny to see such an ad over a 1GB account. I guess that’s what happens when you’re a part of a very large company, with different divisions in charge of different things

Hotmail in the meantime is way behind, giving 250MB to people from the US and Puerto Rico, but keeping a measly 2MB mailbox sizes for the rest. Which is their right, it’s a free service, and no one can complain not getting what they pay for (Although for the same amount of ad viewing, which is the payment, we can get more elsewhere). But it’s utterly ridiculous when they keep telling people about their pro service (paid), where the email size (which they still present as a major benefit) is not more than the free competitors’ offers.

May 7th, 2005 at 0:59 EET | Categories: Marketing, Web | Track comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.