The Lonesome Road

I guess it was inevitable - the mail service providers have finally gone whole hog. The dudes at mail2world [http://www.mail2world.com] have removed the last space barrier. They are offering a no space limit mail account - even on the free e-mail scheme.

Storage space on email accounts has been the latest USP for almost all the providers. Rediff started the trend offering 1Gb of storage space and Google is now offering a mailbox which literally grows before your eyes. All of this forced Yahoo! and Hotmail to up the space offered. Yahoo went first increasing the account size to 250 Mb (and planning to upgrade it it 1Gb soon). Similarly, Hotmail is now providing 250Mb mail boxes as well (though only for US/Can residents).

Ultimately, all of this is more or less useless. From what I have seen of mail accounts, most people don’t really get/keep all that much mail. I’m not saying everyone’s a neat freak - but I feel that on an average, most people don’t use more than a 100Mb - and I think this is a high figure. It really does not cost the providers to dole out large mailboxes - most of the space goes unused anyway. There are always those people who make the best use of the storage space provided - turning their mailboxes into portable online briefcases.

To be very honest, I like Rediffmail simply because of it’s speed and low overhead on the page load. Google also wins high marks due to the free POP3 mail system that it provides. Now if only they put in IMAP….

Until next time.. fill the mailbox!