Well, there is Google’s Gmail (1 GB), and then this week Yahoo decided to say..”Hey wait, instead of 4 MB, lets give our users 100 MB”…Now MSN is going to up the ante, but they haven’t said how much yet. BTW, all three of these are “free” web based email clients. You could always pay Yahoo or MSN for more space, but who wants to do that. Maybe people should just clean out their email boxes? Or maybe archive it off to CD? 10 years from now, no one is going to look at their email they got about “10% off at Best Buy” or “New Polos at the Gap.com”. Anyways, I say store as little as possible online in your email box, because sooner or later the email server that you go through (Yahoo, MSN, Google, etc) will just start snooping and sending you ad’s related to your email. If you want to have a big email box, buy a Win2K3 server and install Exchange 2003 Enterprise, register your domain, and away you go, practically unlimited email size. Below is part of the article from betanews.com, I haven’t put a link because I think their site is off and on anyways.
from betanews:
Redmond executives have been mulling over how to respond to the storage frenzy, and are set to unveil a plan that will go into effect in July.Although still in beta testing, the launch of Google’s free Gmail service heated up the competition by offering customers a whopping 1GB of e-mail storage. Yahoo! fired back this week by boosting customer inboxes to 100MB and unveiling an updated user interface, which Microsoft called “quite good.”
“We have been intentionally quiet over this period, as we formulated our plans, and waited to see the Yahoo response, feeling it would be best to see how strong Yahoo’s counter would be before going public with our own,” Blake Irving, corporate vice president of MSN’s Communication Services group, told employees.
Microsoft hopes that by giving customers enough space, it can move the media focus away from storage as a key selling point and reduce the emerging threat posed by media darling Google.
“We are going to respond in a big way and will eliminate email storage as an issue for our users,” said Irving.
Steve Novoselac's Blog 