war of providing free email ! who will win ?

The service once popularised by old players of the
field like Hotmail and Yahoo is now at its pinnacle
with the so-called 'Gigabyte war'. The competition
goes on with even the newbies providing the features
which are far better than some of the oldies.
The major attraction being the storage space provided.
It was started with the entry of Google's Gmail with 1 GB
of storage in mid 2004(April Fool's 2004, to be precise).
At its nascence, Gmail was not fully supported by couple of
browsers( old versions of IE, Netscape and Opera) and
features like text-editing capabilities were
absent. It's lightning fast speed was a plus point but
a major glitch : it was available through invitation only.
So general users did not have access to Gmail. Besides,
a faction of reviewers were concerned about the privacy
of messages as Gmail was using targeted ads based on certain
keywords in the messages.However, the Gmail chaps claimed that
no human intervention existed in the process and it was
automated. (Well, its relevant to mention here that no-email
service can be fully guaranteed to be secure whatever security
measures may be taken. Even if the messages are encrypted,
digitally signed or they use secure channels/protocols (like SSL/TLS)
while transmitting, the messages can be read, manipulated
while in storage by the Server Administrators or some
unauthorized agents.) Yahoo immediately responded by increasing
its storage to 100MB at first and after few days to good 250 MB.
Rediffmail followed with an offer of 1GB. The multitude of users
were anticipating something big from MSN Hotmail but to their
disappointment, after quite a long gap, it offered 250MB of space
that also to the users of the US and the international users had to
satisfy themselves with meagre 2 MB. Here again Microsoft showed
its discrimination towards its customers and the founder of Hotmail
Mr Sabeer Bhatia has also expressed unsatisfaction in this matter.
It is understood that for MSN it may be economically infeasibe to
provide additional storage to about 187 millions of Hotmail users but
they have to do it if they want to survive.A big no-no with Hotmail
and Rediffmail is voluminous ad-campaign,bulk mails that flood one's
mailbox when using their service.Such mails almost consume the additional
storage available.
With time, the features of these mail services are being enhanced.
For instance, Lycos, Yahoo, now Gmail provide good text editing
capabilities. Gmail can now be accessed with wide variety of browsers and
its storage is continuosly increasing governed by a counter at its main
page.Indiatimes, Gmail provide address prompter feature
just like when using mail clients, the user will be displayed a list
of address when s/he types first few letter of the recipient.The ability
to search messages from the chunk is significant when there are
thousands or perhaps millions of messages in the mailbox.Labelling
and marking of important mails, threaded messages(i.e. displaying
in the form of conversations), mail forwarding are just some of
the features users often longed for.So far, Gmail is the only
giant which provides POP and even SMTP service to its users
so that they can download, send messages using mail clients.
Only Hotmail and Gmail provides security to the mails in transit
by implementing SSL over HTTP.
Gmail is challenged by Streamload(www.streamload.com) with 10 GB
of free storage and email where one can store movies and other
digital media.The upload options available with it are terrific.
Now, it is wrestling with a new player called Mail2World(www.mail2world.com)
which provides unlimited storage space, with domain management
facility, video mail etc. Gmail's space can be used as an on-line
drive using a third party tool called Gmail drive
(http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm) After installing this piece
of software, a new partition will be displayed in the 'My Computer'
titled 'Gmail Drive' and one can put files/folders into it like
in other drives.When one goes on-line the files wil be transferred
to Gmail space in the form of mails.
The sole benefit of this unruly competition is derived by the
users who have lot of options to choose based on their preferances.
They can now safely put their image files, music, movies etc on-line
and can have access to them at any time from any part on the planet.
Moreover,things stored that way are safe from catastrophes like
earthquakes,floods, fire as the servers are located in data-centers
that are well-protected against these calamities. As periodic
back-ups are maintained at the Servers and often they are mirrored,
one can be assured that their digital info will not be accidentally
lost/erased. So all the netizens are invited to
make use of these free facilities to the fullest...