Rediff Joins The 1GB Webmail Club

BGT writes "Gmail has for sure caused a furor by offering announcing 1 GB of space for free. But they are still in the beta stage and you cannot sign up for an account yet. Now India-based Rediff claims to be the first to actually start offering 1GB of space for free, with their Rediffmail service." (Spymac mail users might disagree with the "first free gig" claim.) Signing up for a rediffmail account was straightforward; the site has an intelligent add-a-contact interface when you send email to a new address, but lacks the searchability and multiple-label capability of gmail.

15M x 1GB

[rd4tech]

Rediff.com will also start freeing up over 15 million email addresses that have not been in use over the years, giving new users a better chance of finding an email id of their choice

So.. 15,000,000 X 1 GB = ...
What will happen after two years when those inboxes start filling up to the top?

Me too!.. but not quite.

[LostCluster]

It's interesting to see all of these companies upping their e-mail storage space, however, the 1 GB aspect is just the headliner of Google's product.

Google has quite the list of other new features in development including their own take on spam filter technology, and their intelligent sorting among topics. They also their text-based ad model that nobody else has been able to knock off yet. Yahoo has the chance to do so with Overture, but they've yet to connect Overture to Yahoo Mail.

So, even if everybody else in the free e-mail space can pull 1 GB out of their hats to, they still have a lot of work to do to catch up to what Google's working on.

Re:15M x 1GB

[msh104]

well, in two years, harddisks will contain much more space, so this problem might just solve itself. and also note that way not every user is going to fill up there entire mailbox. think about granny!

amazing

[Coneasfast]

what amazes me is why the VAST MAJORITY of people continue to use hotmail, the crappiest email service ever. with its whopping 2 mb of space, irritating user interface, MS adverts, and many many other annoying features.

most people use it because 'it's good enough' and 'it's what everyone else uses' . well, they would know what a bad service it is if they use something else and have a comparison.

Size is not important

[InternationalCow]

But search capability is. I find it amazing that everybody and his grandmother keeps trippin' about the 1G of storage. Who cares. If I want to keep old emails around I archive them in a tarball that I keep handy somewhere. I receive large amounts of non-spam email and what I really, really need is a decent search capability (not only on literals but also on categories and so on). Mailsmith (MacOSX app) does a decent job. It uses grep and indexing iirc. In my tarballs, I just grep for what I want. But it feels clunky in a way, so if Google can offer ueber search capability and allows for intelligent filtering of incoming mails, I'll sign up the moment it reaches 1.0

E-mail bandwidth is minimal

[KalvinB]

I run a mail server. It doesn't take much bandwidth at all. Sure there's 1GB of storage but a very small percentage of the users are going to go anywhere near the limit. E-mail is a very inefficient way to send large files. There's about 20% overhead.

Smaller "mom & pop" shops can compete by offering a unique/catchy domain name.

I offer POP3 and IMAP as well as secured web-access. Google doesn't support those other two without a third party hack.

Google offers a lot but they don't offer anything that nobody else can offer except the domain name. And they don't offer all the possible features people want for an e-mail account.

Ben

Stability

[mrpuffypants]

One of the biggest reasons that Google's GMail is still more attractive is simply stability.

If you sign up for Spymac mail or Rediffmail you don't have the backing of a major corporation that has an infrastructure in place to support future growth, investors looking for the company to *not* fold, and a dedicated staff just for your data.

Any fly-by-night place can buy a massive hard drive and start offering 1 free GB of mail, but if they run out of cash and fold then what happens to all of your mail in their old system? At least with google there is a pattern of longeviety that seems to ensure your data will be protected for a long while.

Re:What is the fuss here

[Chess_the_cat]

I am glad I am not the CEO of Yahoo right now as I would be incredibly nervous.

Why? Yahoo! is still the world's number one web portal. Google's not going to start offering Fantasy Hockey as well are they?

Re:and what are the odds...

[ganhawk]

Actually, Rediff was founded in 1996 (I think the same year as Google ?). It has been quite popular since then in India. In fact I think it is the biggest Indian portal. I dont think Rediff will go down in 3 years.

Re:What is the fuss here

[burns210]

ofcourse it was natural... but google went from the standard 2-10 megs(of hotmail and others), past the 100 mark (payed-for yahoo email) and went to 1000 megs... unheard of size increase, THAT is what makes it interesting.

not anymore :)

[tanveer1979]

Well it sure does. I had an account on rediff and due to their atrocious spam policy my email address is unusable. But soon it is about to change. Rediff has employed the services of one of the best anti spam guys in the business :). Cant name who but i am sure its just a couple of months when rediff becomes the best anti spam email. Infact i expect it to rival outblaze!