I'll gmail you...Google email coming soon
Oh oh. This spells trouble for Yahoo Mail and Microsoft's Hotmail who've put increasing number of restrictions on users. My Hotmail account keeps getting canceled when I don't use it for a few months and my mom's email account always fills up. They want users to upgrade to a premium account by paying an annual fee but most consumers like myself will just head to "gmail" now.
And Google doesn't have to deal with the burden of monetizing its endusers by offering premium services. It benefits when more and more content is created and it can serve ads that it sells to businesses. According to this Wall Street Journal story (subscription required):
Google (www.google.com) said Wednesday it is testing a free e-mail service with huge message-storage capacity and advanced search capabilities, dubbed "Gmail." Both the storage and search elements of Gmail represent big new challenges to Yahoo Mail and MSN's Hotmail services, which charge fees for comparatively modest storage capacity and offer users more limited search and mail-organizing features.
...But in the face of Google's service, they may be forced to slash or abandon these fees, or else overhaul their offerings. That's because Gmail will offer a gigabyte -- 1,000 megabytes -- of storage, which the company said is enough to store 500,000 pages of e-mail. Currently, the service is available only to test users, but Google's Mr. Rosing said Gmail will be available to the public sometime in the "next weeks to months," depending on the success of the test period and the extent of product refining necessary.