Free webmail space upgrades

As far as I can tell, this is old news, but Wired is just now pointing it out. Either that or the news came out that this would be happening, and Wired is now pointing out that it actually did happen.
Either way, they mention that free webmail services and their paid for premium counterparts recently saw increases in disk space limits. It is of course impossible to have one of these types of articles and not have them mention that the reason for the increase is likely Google's Gmail and its 1GB of free space (supported by ads).

Personally for me, the only thing in the article that was new/interesting was the fact that there is a site called gmail swap that... well, it does exactly what it sounds like. It gives you a medium through which to bargain things for Gmail accounts - I haven't reviewed it to see how much of it is a joke, but I would imagine something like that lends itself to some amusing suggestions.

Also note that Wired's article suggests that with the space increases, people have less of a reason to switch from one to the other - specifically not worrying about Gmail and its free 1GB of storage anymore.
While that is likely one reason, it overlooks the differences in searching and general usability that Gmail offers, which one should take into account when comparing various free webmail programs.

Posted by Eric at November 13, 2004 11:57 PM | TrackBack