Gmail - Competition

Competition

See also: Comparison of webmail providers

After Gmail's initial development and launch, many existing web mail services quickly increased their storage capacity.

For example, Hotmail increased space for some users from 2 MB to 25 MB, with 250 MB after 30 days, and 2 GB for Hotmail Plus accounts. Yahoo! Mail went from 4 MB to 100 MB and 2 GB for Yahoo! Mail Plus accounts. Yahoo! Mail storage then increased to 250 MB and in late April 2005 to 1 GB. Yahoo! Mail announced that it would be providing "unlimited" storage to all its users in March 2007 and began providing it in May 2007.

These were all seen as moves to stop existing users from switching to Gmail and to capitalize on the newly rekindled public interest in web mail services. The desire to catch up was especially noted in the case of MSN's Hotmail, which upgraded its email storage from 250 MB to the new Windows Live Hotmail which includes 5 GB of storage that grows with you (expands if necessary). In November 2006, MSN Hotmail upgraded all free accounts to 1 GB of storage.

In June 2005, AOL started providing all AIM screen names with their own email accounts with 2 GB of storage.

Google may terminate a Gmail account after nine months of inactivity. Other webmail services have different, often shorter, times for marking an account as inactive. Yahoo! Mail deactivates dormant accounts after four months.

As well as increasing storage limits following the launch of Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail also enhanced their email interfaces. During 2005, Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail matched Gmail's attachment size of 10 MB. Following the footsteps of Gmail, Yahoo! launched the Yahoo! Mail Beta service and Microsoft launched Windows Live Hotmail, both incorporating Ajax interfaces. Google increased the maximum attachment size to 20 MB in May 2007 and to 25 MB in June 2009.

Read more about this topic:  Gmail

Famous quotes containing the word competition:

    “Wearing overalls on weekdays, painting somebody else’s house to earn money? You’re working class. Wearing overalls at weekends, painting your own house to save money? You’re middle class.”
    —Lawrence Sutton, British prizewinner in competition in Sunday Correspondent (London)

    “Like many businessmen of genius he learned that free competition was wasteful, monopoly efficient. And so he simply set about achieving that efficient monopoly.”
    —Mario Puzo (b. 1920)

    “The praise of ancient authors proceeds not from the reverence of the dead, but from the competition and mutual envy of the living.”
    —Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679)