With a gigabyte of storage behind every mailbox, Google are launching a new free email service, GMail, and naturally it has powerful searching facilities built in. Google hope that contextual ads inside messages will pay for the service and not put users off too much – they are not planning on using popups or banners.
Microsoft and Yahoo offer only a microscopic 4mb of storage with their basic accounts and don’t have anything like the same search functions – though advertising is kept to banners on their portal pages. One gigabye is enough to store about half a million plain text email messages a page long. Messages are threaded into conversation threads automatically, reducing the need for users to spend time sorting mail
Larry Page said “Gmail solves all of my communication needs. It’s fast and easy and has all the storage I need. And I can use it from anywhere. I love it!” Well, we’re glad he likes it.
Thankfully, the service provides a spam filter, so you need only store the things you want.
We’ve signed up for a test account – we’ll let you know how we get on.