Hotmail, Others Follow Gmail's Storage Boost

BobPaul writes "Following behind Yahoo Mail's recent upgrade to 100MB of free storage, and trailing behind GMail's 1GB (last mentioned here), ZDNet reports that Hotmail will soon boost email storage as well. 'The upgrade will increase Hotmail's free e-mail storage limits from 2 megabytes to 250MB and its paid e-mail service, which costs $19.95 a year, from 10MB to 2 gigabytes. The changes will begin in early July.' Another interesting tidbit from the article: 'Ask Jeeves also plans to grant its e-mail subscribers more storage room... According to an e-mail sent to iWon users, Ask Jeeves plans to give each of the sites' e-mail subscribers 125MB of free storage.'"

Yeah, but Gmail's better

[David Horn]

Hotmail and Lycos are missing the point here - people aren't flocking to Google cause of the 1GB of space; it's because of the innovative design; the powerful search; the conversation layout; the lack of intrusive ads etc.

They have to fix the fact that their services are crap before handing out space willy-nilly.

Does anybody use all that space?

[King_of_Prussia]

I was under the impression that most of the people who routinely sent or recieved large attachments had a 'proper' paid email service, with more features than your average webmail. Will any of these new developments lure any of these people back into the land of webmail?

This is all well and good, but..

[Anonymous Coward]

There's more to GMail than pure storage capacity. Personally, i wouldn't consider switching back to Hotmail or any other service until they improve the system in some of the ways Google have -- such as the conversation system for tracking replies, and the searchable "All Mail" folder which holds both incoming and outgoing conversations.
Its funny -- in all the hyperbole about the disk space being offered, people are neglecting some of the real innovations/advancements GMail has managed.

Whats the diffrence?

[Viceice]

But what good is all that storage space without a proper way of archiving and accessing it?

Remember years ago when the max e-mail size wasn't 2mb and you suddenly got mail bombed? You had to go looking through 100's of pages of mail and deleting all the junk. All that work is enough to give anybody carpel tunnel syndrome. Also, Hotmail's recent restriction on opening only one page at a time only makes the matter worse.

The reason why Gmail can give 1GB of space is because it has developed an excellent system of mail archival, retrieval and display. So unless Hotmail changes its interface and pulls something as good as Google, we are soon going to see frustrated users shifting through many pages of spam.

Re:Yeah, but Gmail's better

[LiquidCoooled]

This I agree with.

The main problem I have with hotmail is its lack of respect for sent mails, it is up to a user to say they want to save every outgoing message, and even then, they are deleted frequently.

It just stops it being usable for anything other than signups and notifications.

gMail has made it easy and fun once again, and I'm glad the others are panicing.

fast. lightweight interface vs slow, ad-ridden one

[cryophan]

I have not seen gmail, but I know that one thing that attracted me to google at the start was that on my dialup connection, google was a FAST download, because of its lack of large graphical ads, etc., compared to the slow and bulky yahoo interface. The reason I avoid hotmail and yahoo mail now is because their interfaces are still ad-ridden and bulky and slow as hell on dialup.

If the Gmail interface is as fast as the google interface, gmail will eat hotmail and yahoo for lunch.

Re:Yeah, but Gmail's better

[turnin]

... adding to that, amount of mandatory personal information yahoo,hotmail collects is more in comparison to gmail.

Re:Is it really a good idea...

[Threni]

> To use a remote computer as permanent storage?
> I just don't trust a free service provider to care too much about my data.

You are conflating two issues. Of course it's a good idea to have the data stored non-locally. If your office/house burns down, you're going to thank those servers.

Store your data in multiple locations if you're worried about it. Get 2,3,5,10,50 free accounts and treat them like a RAID server if its data you just can't afford to lose.

Whether or not a service is free is irrelevant. Yahoo/Hotmail etc aren't going to want to get a bad name for losing customers data even if you're not paying.

Paging Apple, paging apple

[weave]

Yo Apple, how about boosting the space us .mac PAYING subscribers get? They charge like $350 a year EXTRA for a gig of space. For $100/year you get 15 megs for mail and 100 megs for storage.

Granted, .mac does a shitload more than these others, but, hey, it's time to boost! :)

Re:All the storage I need.

[Beowulf_Boy]

Some people are like me, and move between home and school every few months. Would you like to have to waite 2 days for DNS settings to circulate every 3 months or so, so that you can get your email?

Plus, I like being able to check it at work, where all I have access to is a terminal during my lunch hour.

Re:competition

[bnet41]

Sadly what you say is pretty true, especially concerning the role reversial. Some people seem to have such a biased view is MS that the never allow them to do anything right. I will agree with everyone else that this is great for the market, 2MB was really low.

gmail availability...

[RapDes]

I've been patiently waiting for gmail to become available publicly. But until it does I'll start using my Yahoo account again now that I have increased attachment and storage space. I wonder if hotmail, yahoo and the like are luring away many potential gmail users because of the long beta testing period...?

Re:Yeah, but Gmail's better

[LiquidCoooled]

Im already sorted for accounts thanks, and I see your point about pop access.

However, in googles case, leaving the mails ONLINE actually makes for a better solution, since taking the mail offline and into which ever mail applications store prevents the pigeons from sorting and searching my mail, it becomes just a dump, and for that, a smallish standard account is better suited.

I prefer having google searching my personal mails and its grouping and management are better than any of the offline pop mail programs I've tried.

There is room in this world for both types of account, for instance, I wouldn't even consider moving business mails onto ANY of the free providers, thats just suicidal, but for personal mails google just wipes the floor with everything else out there.

Filesharing and backups by email

[Anonymous Coward]

It's becoming a good way to share files with friends. Create a new email account, upload a CD image to an email account and hand out the password.

Also a good way to backup those music CD's. :-)

.MAC

[winski]

Now when are Apple going to follow suit and up the paltry 15mb e-mail storage I get for $99 a year!!!

It is NOW we are getting somewhere!

[Anonymous Coward]

While this competition is mild in terms of upgrading existing technology it is these types of competitions I've been expecting from the tech industry.

-AMD vs. Intel
-Apple MAC OS vs MS Windows vs Linux
-Nvidia vs ATi
-Playstation 3 vs X-Box 2 vs whatever the next big "N" system is...

I hope my ISP http://www.speakeasy.org follows suit!

Re:Yeah, but Gmail's better

[bigkahunafish]

Im sticking with yahoo for now....

Its the most reliable out there: Hotmail doesnt always work, thats why I switched to yahoo.

Yahoo is fast. when i send an email, its to its destination instantly, With hotmail, it usually took over an hour.

Gmail sounds ok: Not sure about the privacy issues...but if gmail made it possible to email LARGE attachments (>100megs)... that would be sweet.

Re:Competition?

[BarryNorton]

Actually they played and won in a competitive world of DOS and C-compilers. Then moved on the word processors. If it's new to anyone it's Google, who want to project forward from killing off Altavista...

Re:fast. lightweight interface vs slow, ad-ridden

[value_added]

IIRC, yahoo recently advertised an "image free" interface. Never use it myself, but I just checked and there's only a couple of small gifs on the page.

Re:All the storage I need.

[PhoenixFlare]

You've obviously not actually used or looked into GMail very much, if at all - as has already been said, the real treat is not the 1GB storage.

The real good stuff comes in the form of a clean and fast interface, being able to use Google search on your mail, threaded display of your messages, having webmail that doesn't blast you with intrusive ads, and so on.

Re:fast. lightweight interface vs slow, ad-ridden

[cipher uk]

it is. the main reason i use gmail is because of its speed.

i don't have to download spam mail from my isp which can take a while on a 56k connection of you have >150 spam emails. With google not only does it sort the spam nicely and out the way, it stops me having to download the body of the email.
Couple that with the other great features of gmail and the fact that i won't fill it and i don't have much reason to use my isp's email address.
The only time i use my isp's email address is for job and university applications.

Re:What about spymac?

[acariquara]

Completely free!

And completely useless. My email account there does not receive a single message. After some outages and weird behaviour like 3 days to get a message sent to SELF it simply got dormant. Now every single message sent to that address goes AWOL.

The hosting thing is really tricky to work. Expect 2 weeks before your account is set up. I know it's a free service but I think they went overboard on the "1gig" announcement and couldn't handle the load. They are not Google, you know.

My take on it all

[ajs318]

So Google and others want to offer a 1GB e-mail service with indexing and searchability. Well, that's fine and dandy as far as ideas go, but you have to remember that this means your mail being stored on someone else's server; possibly for longer than you wanted -- and no way of being sure it's been deleted when you no longer want it.

I'm thinking about rolling my own searchable e-mail archive. And it won't be limited to one poxy gigabyte, either! I could register a domain and point the MX to my TV cable broadband connection, but the IP address is not guaranteed truly static, so there's a possibility that mail could get lost or even wind up on someone else's box -- so I'll trust my existing PO3 connection for now, counting it as another reason to add to my list in favour of a "proper" (read: business class) broadband connection. Next I'll hack Spamassassin to bits: when I'm done, it will store the header info and spamminess test results in a MySQL database, and the body in a text file. While I'm at it, I'll index the attachments in terms of mime type and encoding into another database. Finally, I'll set up some scripts to manage searching according to my databases and body contents.

Eventually -- which is to say, once I can go a month without resorting to phpMyAdmin or grep -- I'll release it; probably under a BSD-like licence, but with this extra little clause: "Any redistribution of the software or derived work in binary form must be accompanied by an offer of the source code, to be valid until the lapse of copyright on the work in question".

Re:Hard disk manufacturers happy campers?

[fulana_lover]

one might argue the reverse might be true - people may want/need/buy smaller hard drives for their personal computers because they have such large online, virtual drives. So maybe western digital sells 100,000 more drives to google but 10,000,000 less profitable/smaller drives to Dell/etc. great for users - upload (encrypted) important stuff regularly to gmail, no worries about backup/remote access/version control/etc.

Reminds me of the Cold War

[dioscaido]

The US continually bought more and more weapons, which it would never use, so that Russia would follow suit -- until Russia bankrupted itself.

Gmail only has a couple of thousand users, so it can continue upping it's storage. Hotmail & Yahoo follow suit, but with it's million users, they asplode!

Re:Whats the diffrence?

[jbrw]

My boss has maxed out his 100Mb of paid Hotmail email storage. The bloody thing keeps timing out opening his folders, doing searches etc.

I dread to think what'll happen when he's got 2Gb to play with.

Gmail=Good IDea, Excellent Execution

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, spoken like someone who doesn't yet have a Gmail account. The extra space is the *least* impressive thing about Gmail.

Gmail will succeed because it's interface is a radical improvement not only over webmail, but of email in general. I wish my standard email client had half the features Gmail has, and given time I'm sure it will.

Just like word of mouth spread that Google was a fantastic search engine that did things better than all the others, so too will word spread that Gmail's interface is far and away superior to what the others are offering. Hotmail/Yahoo could offer a terabyte of free space, and I'd still use Gmail because its interface is that good.

The brilliance behind this strategy...

[spoonani]

GMail's rollout appears to have a two-pronged approach: 1) Force other e-mail providers into costly capital expenditures. remember, 1gb of space initially for a couple thousand invitees is still less than 250 mb for millions of users. MS and yahoo's teams will no doubt be prodded to recoup their capital expenditures for all users, while gmail can stay lean and mean as long as it wants, while at the same time dictate the market structure. 2) generate ginormous buzz. As others have said, "why not go to spymac?" The answer for John Q. public lies in the difference in brand equity between spymac and google. If an average user has decided to make a switch over to a new e-mail provider, [e-mail] is "worth" more than [e-mail], regardless of features.

Re:Gmail=Good IDea, Poor Execution

[scrm]

Google may be the poster child for a 'good' corporation but the roll-out of the gmail system is most definitely not one of the better acheievements. By pre-announcing gmail so far in advance, all the other free providers have now upped their storage. While gmail is still not publicly available.

I disagree totally. Gmail's two-phase rollout has given Google the option to observe the competition's response and react to it before their service is even officially launched (not to mention creating a buzz that would make Seth Godin [sethgodin.com] proud).

I've had a GMail account for about two months now and the system is in a constant state of flux. I've reported bugs one day and they've been fixed the next. Each and every bug report or piece of feedback gets a personal response from the Google team. They are very serious about perfecting the system.

The only reason Google are waiting so long to launch it is because they want to make sure it's the best webmail out there bar none. When it's launched, that's when the comparisons can really start. And that's when Hotmail et al won't be able to shake a stick at Gmail.

The real war behind the Gig storage battles

[CinqDemi]

I will venture here (or remind those who think that way already) that the real issue is about "owning" everyone's personal files, **not just email**. So the Gig battles are just the opening salvo. Having your files easily accessible from anywhere without you having to lug your laptop or a hard drive *is* useful.

I'd like to hear about alternatives and what this means for the IT/ISP players in the next few years. To elucidate on all this:

It doesnt take a Ph.D to add 1 + 2; and maybe consider a more standards driven approach as in (3)

(1)Microsoft, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, etc. all want to have your personal info for targeted advertising. Both Microsoft and Apple are researching a system whereby all the info in your hard drive is easily searchable.

(2)All indications are that most computing will soon be delivered over the (internet) pipes, with broadband available everywhere. ( SUN's original motto, then IBM's, now everyone's)

Well, personally, until the dust settles on the privacy issues I wouldnt mind having a GMail account to use as "light" personal/business info internet folder.

I use my own server VPN connection meantime, so I can already always access all my files from anywhere. But i dont see it being a practical mode for the majority of users - as .. recently said, we dont need to run a power generator in every home to get electricity; simialrly why would we need to maintain a server with all its headaches.

(3)which goes back to the issue, might it not be better in the meantime for all ISP's to adopt a standard user-friendly personal data repository, possibly mirroring what the user has at home/office ?

Andre

PS. Slightly off topic, on a personal note: if I'm on target on this issue, that would make it 3 out of 3. (previous posts indicated that the MAC /Win comparisons didnt fairly compare systems of the same price, and that the Palm-Handspring thing was for Palm to get into cell phone territory FAST - in hindsight, that was confirmed)

Gmail speed

[sudotcsh]

I'm really not sure where I stand in this fight here. Wait, no ... I know where I stand - I'm a screaming Gmail fan.

I have a friend who has a paid Yahoo! account and I sent him an invite while he was over at my place. He logged in to Yahoo! to retrieve the invite (which of course had been placed in the Spam folder, but that's neither here nor there). When he finally found it and got signed up he couldn't stop talking about how cool Gmail was, how fast it was, thanks a lot for the invite, etc. etc.

Then the next day Yahoo! upped their space for paid users to 2 gigs or whatever it was, and all the sudden he was gloating about "I have TWO gigs!".

Yeah, man. Two gigs of a service you were blasting yesterday for being slow and inferior. Whatever.

I guess the point is that to some extent these carrots are working, and they're able to make users forget their pain by offering more space.

I have faith that in time he'll remember how fast his Gmail account is and start moving over there. Our friends and family can be extracted from the dark side - it'll just take some work.

Oh, what? You don't have a Gmail account yet? Well, I gots four invites left - hit me up at kevinomara bat gmail mot com.

Why do people care about the search?

[LincolnQ]

Now, I haven't used Gmail, but what makes searching your email through Gmail any better than a grep? (or any old indexed search if you prefer). The POINT of the Google search algorithm is to rely on cross-references between items in the search space to determine which items are the most likely to be important.

There are no cross-references between emails.

(well, besides In-Reply-To, which is not too tough -- finding the first email in a thread is not particularly hard).

I usually search the _web_ for something I don't know a lot about in order to find out more about it. But when I search my email, it is because I am trying to remember a specific detail of a certain conversation. I have to know a word or two in the email in both cases in order to find it anyway.

Look what happens

[adeyadey]

Look what happens when you search google for the keyword "gmail" - this site comes up third!

http://gmail-is-too-creepy.com/

Good on google for not censoring it, Cant imagine MS would allow that..

Re:competition

[timlee]

I agree with that. I also think that since storage space is no longer an issue, it's all about who has the best GUI. Google is probably the best that I can see so far because of its Labels system instead of Folders. It takes getting used to but it is definitely better. My only complaint is that they should allow users with more control over how the message looks. But it's only in beta and I sent feedback about this already so hopefully they decide to implement it.

Re:Too little too late

[stevesliva]

Too late for me, as well. I'm already substantially transitioned over to Gmail, and it's extremely nice not being limited to 10 paltry mail filters!

Goodbye Hotmail, you've lost me as a customer.

Re:capitalism's finest

[Ubergrendle]

Why MP3 trading is a foregone conclusion:
1. P2P Applications
2. Binary Newsgroups
3. Bittorrent
4. IRC
5. FTP
6. Messenger to messenger.
6. Now anonymous based e-mail accounts.

The RIAA is currently trying to sue users of #1. They might go after #3, 4 and 5. They can't stop #2 and #6. They've lost, whether you believe that mp3 trading is copyright infringement or not.

Re:competition

[tomhudson]

Yes, but it all boils down to a question of trust.

I trust Google. I trust Yahoo. I don't trust Microsoft/hotmail.

One of the interesting things about how Google has been able to increase the perceived value of their gmail service is that you need an invite (thanks turg [slashdot.org]).

It also creates a "web of trust". People who have been invited by other people are less likely to use a gmail account to spamminate everyone. This is the true innovation of gmail.

Re:MSN Hotmail: behind the competition

[Anonymous Coward]

It must stink for those who recently paid for Premium Hotmail storage... $$$ down the drain.

Re:competition

[tomhudson]

Poster wrote:

Too bad the invites will die once it moves out of beta, then.

Why should they stop the invite system? As I pointed out, it creates a "web of trust", and a traceable route for who invited who, so it's less likely that spammers will be able to use it in bulk.

Consider this scenario:

1. Spammer snags a gmail account.
2. Spammer gets invite credits
3. Spammer "invites" a dozen fake spam accounts to gmail
4. Spammer starts using those new acounts as response boxes for spam
5. Google flags this
6. Google deletes receiving accounts
7. Google notes that they all originated from invites from one account.
8. Google deletes that account as well.

End result: Spammer has no way to receive his (the vast majority of spammers are guys) responses, goes back to using shotmail or aohell accounts. This results in gmail accounts maintaining their perceived value.

Hopefully, someone from gmail will recognize the value of keeping the invite system, either exclusively, or alongside a seperate open system.

Anyone want to point this thread to the gmail developers?

Re:MSN Hotmail: behind the competition

[n0dez]

Heyy, slow down cowboy!

Yahoo! Mail was the first to upgrade their service following Gmail's storage boost.

If you send email messages to some Hotmail address, they bounce them back to you with no aparent reasons. And don't say that you haven't had some email message bounced back saying "action failed". As I don't save all my email messages, many proofs are gone.
I remember once that I wrote about 10 email messages to a Hotmail.com user and he only got one. In my last message I was asking if he had a non-Hotmail account. I don't know why, but this message wasn't bounced back. He told me that his Hotmail inbox was empty.

Anyway, here's one proof:

She has told me that her Hotmail email account is active, is not the wrong one, and her mailbox is not full nor empty. I have tried to contact her via email several times with no success.

Short version:

64.4.50.99 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: 550 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable


Long version:

24 Jun 2004 14:11:20 -0000
From: MAILER-DAEMON@[removed]
To: [removed]
Subject: failure delivery

Message from [removed].
Unable to deliver message to the following address(es).
[removed]@hotmail.com:
64.4.50.99 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: 550 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable
Giving up on 64.4.50.99.

--- Original message follows.

Return-Path: [removed]
Message-ID: 20040624141120.8231.******@********.****.[removed]
Received: from [**.**.**.***] by ********.****.[removed] via HTTP; Thu,
24 Jun 2004 07:11:20 PDT
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2004 07:11:20 -0700 (PDT)
From: [removed]
Subject: hello
To: [removed]@hotmail.com
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

Are you getting my email messages?


Note: some email addresses, hostnames (excepting hotmail.com) and IPs have been removed due to privacy issues.
[removed] = email address, username or hostname.

Re:competition

[tomhudson]

And they (Google) don't seem to be afraid of the competition. I emailed them this morning suggesting that they keep the invite system (because it creates a "web of trust" between users, and will allow the tracking of spammers who abuse invites to create tons of bogus recipient mail boxes to receive spam responses), and here's what they sent back:

Hello,

Thank you for your suggestion -- we are forwarding it to the appropriate team. We certainly appreciate hearing from Gmail users and encourage you to continue to let us know how we can improve the Gmail experience.

You might be interested to hear that we are working on many upcoming features:

- Automatic forwarding of your email to another account

- Plain HTML version of Gmail

- Import/export Contacts

We hope you enjoy Google's approach to email.

Sincerely,
The Gmail Team

The auto-forwarding and import/export features show they don't fear competition, IMHO.

The text ads don't bother me - I've noticed they actually are relevant to what I'm working on.

Now if we can just convince them that keeping the invite system is worth it ... (hint hint - email them with the suggestion :-)

Re:Paging Apple, paging apple

[King_TJ]

Bleah.... I own no less than 3 Macs over here, and yet I never signed up for a .Mac account!

I've used it a fair bit, since I used to work for a guy who hosted 4 different web sites from his .Mac acct. - and it was up to me to maintain all of those for him.

My impression was, it's way too slow. Apple's only attempt to "address" this issue was to try to cache everything locally on your hard drive in OS X Panther, so it *appears* to be more responsive, rather than solving the real problem.

Not only that, but it only "does more than the others" if you're using it from a Mac. If you have to access a .Mac account from something like a Linux box, or even a Windows PC, you run into immediate limitations. (Sure, Apple provides a Windows client for .Mac, but it's annoying you need one in the first place. Why can't I just ftp files directly up to the account, if need-be?)

Apple keeps trying to get more people on-board with .Mac - but it seems like they're trying to bribe users with perks, rather than truly improve the service itself. (EG. Sign up for .Mac, and you'll get 20% off on your next software purchase at the Apple store! Or sign up now, and we'll let you download free anti-virus software.) Thanks, but no thanks. .Mac would be fine for some small fee like $25/yr. but it's not worth more than that.

The new large accounts limit how you use them...

[Dzimas]

I was surprised to discover a couple of severe limitations to my GMail account. 1) Attachment size is limited to 10MB. 2) Email attachments such as .exe and other "suspicious" files are not transferred. This includes files placed in achives (.zip, .tar, .tgz, .taz, .z, .gz) formats. In other words, I'm stuck storing a few pictures, a couple of mp3s per message, and a heck of a lot of source code. Unfortunate, because I was hoping to use GMail as a very effective archive tool for stuff I want to keep.