Microsoft have just announced a massive increase to their Windows Live Hotmail1 storage capacity. Hotmail now offers standard users 5Gb of mail storage with premium users getting 10Gb of storage.
There seems to be a bit of one-upmanship between all of the big webmail providers. Yahoo offers unlimited storage on their webmail accounts2. I would imagine Yahoo are banking on no one ever trying to test the “unlimited” option, and as mentioned in their footnotes, they have enough of a vague cover for themselves if anyone starts to abuse their offering.
Gmail had originally blown all other webmail services out of the water. They waded into the field offering a whopping 2Gb of mail storage and since then their storage has slowly been increasing and is now up to 2888Mb. However, in comparison to the other service offerings, this amount now seems small. There has been rumours going around that Gmail will be upping it’s webmail storage offering to 9Gb, although they may actually be looking to combine storage for people across all of their services.
For the majority of users, these kinds of email storage limits will never be reached and ultimately users will be gained or lost dependent on the overall service. For me, Gmail is definitely ahead of the rest - mainly due to free pop access allowing me to download all my gmail messages. When I do use webmail, after a bit of a learning curve I have found Gmail to be fast and simple. Windows Live Hotmail is at the bottom of the pack in my book, feeling slow and clunky in comparison to the others.
- This is the new name for Hotmail, which had been renamed Windows Live Mail, but people seemed to find that confusing?!
- Although there is room in their Terms of Service to prevent abuse of this: Yahoo! may establish general practices and limits including the maximum number of email messages that may be sent from or received by an account, the maximum disk space that will be allotted on Yahoo’s servers on your behalf, and the maximum number of times you may access the Service in a given period of time.
9:25 am
October 12th, 2007
[...] I wrote about this a month ago, and it seems like Gmail, once the biggest storage available, is now trailing the big competitors. Yahoo is unlimited (with some terms) and Hotmail has gone up to 5Gb. As far as I can estimate, Gmail’s increasing storage counter should reach 3Gb by the time the day is out. [...]