Spymac follows Google on free gig of storage

Spymac, a Web hosting company for Macintosh aficionados, is giving away e-mail accounts that come with 1 gigabyte of storage, mimicking a move search leader Google made last week.

From Monday, current and new subscribers to Spymac Mail will have access to the storage, according to the company. The free e-mail accounts, which can be used with any operating system, do not rely on keyword scanning or advertising, it said in a posting on the Spymac site.

The launch could signal changes to the free e-mail business Yahoo and Microsoft's Hotmail dominate. These Internet companies impose fees of between $10 and $50 a year for a much smaller amount of e-mail storage. Yahoo subscribers, for example, get 100 megabytes storage--10 times less than Spymac's free 1GB--for $50.

"Yahoo and Hotmail may have to (give away more storage), if they want to stay in the game," said Kevin April, Spymac's co-founder and chief technology officer.

Spymac is trying to promote new Web hosting and auction services by giving away copious amounts of e-mail storage. With roughly 47,000 members, the former Apple Macintosh gossip Web site is small potatoes, compared with Google and other free-mail providers. But Spymac's move to offer more storage is among the first signs that the market is moving toward parity and indicates the relatively low cost of such a move.

Last week, Google shook the industry, when it said it would launch Gmail, a searchable Web-based e-mail service with enough storage to let subscribers keep messages indefinitely. Google plans to support the service by scanning e-mail and then delivering ads related to the content of messages. The initiative flagged a new direction for Google, while it also challenged the norm in the Web e-mail market.

Yahoo and MSN have made few changes to their system interfaces in recent years, but they have sought to charge fees for feature upgrades such as added storage. Yahoo is starting to use storage upgrades in its promotions, advertising price breaks for added disk space. And last week, it sent an e-mail promotion to selected subscribers, giving away 100 megabytes.

April said it's relatively cheap to upgrade members to additional storage from the 25 megabytes it had previously offered. He calculated that it would cost an average of $5 per person for 1 gigabyte of storage; that is, if the member were to use the entire allotted space.

A 1-gigabyte e-mail account can store up to 8 billion bits of data, or the equivalent of 500,000 pages of messages, according to April.

He said the storage allotments will help bring in new members, which will support its paid advertising, professional Web hosting and auction services.

[lysglimt]

Gmail good and bad

Gmail by Google
Beeing an email industry insider (I founded the email provider runbox.com) I have had a good look at Gmail by Google this week.
Gmail is different, and it is good. But there is still quite a lot to be desired from it.
Gmail is based on the premise that you store all your email online, we at runbox are of the same belief and have been working on this for 5 years.
So in some fundamental ways runbox and Google agree here.

What's good with Gmail:
- Online storage and massive storage space.
- Neat interface.
- Non intrusive ads, Google does this well.
- Some neat new ways of organizing email, they have borrowed some from Operas email client and come up with some new on their own.
You do searches and store the searches, this way email can be found several different ways.
- Extensive use of Javascript that allows your browser to act more like a local application.

What's not so good with Gmail:
- They don't allow anything else but online storage, your mail is stuck online.
I like giving people options.
It does not have POP, SMTP, IMAP, WAP, Mobile text only interface, SMS. It only has the browser baser interface.
- The ads are still there, I believe you waste time, bandwidth and most importantly your concentration by having the ads there.
- Javascript can slow things down if you are on a low bandwidth client like over a phone modem. It also requires a new browser, sorry Lynx users - no will do.
- The fact that they explicitly store your data and mine your data, the privacy issue is important.
- Support, you cant purchase a premium service and you will therefore not get premium support even if you are willing to pay for it.
- Still unsolved child deceases - I have been in the email business for 5 years and I have some idea of the trouble Gmail will face in the next few months. They will have some major hurdles to jump over going forward, though I have no doubt they will eventually overcome them.

Conclusion:
Gmail is an innovative product from Google that will make Google a lot of searches clicks and therefore money. It is brilliant for Google as their number of searches will go drastically up.

The new application is neat, and many will like it. People claim that Gmail will also have new and better virus scan and spam scan. I doubt that, we follow the spam scan and virus scan industry and there are no secrets in this business. Its really about having a team that can implement and manage the systems as they become available to everyone. Anyway, time will tell if Gmail does it any better than anyone else on this.

For the demanding email user Gmail does not offer the range in options you would desire. Gmail is build on a particular business model of showing ads and will tie you into this model. If you want to download your email to MS Outlook, or use it with a text only interface on your cell phone you cant. So if you want to have all email options open, you will still need a premium service. Time will show if Gmail will offer a premium service, but I doubt it as they are in the business of showing ads.

I believe Gmail will take a substantial part of the free email market, they will eat from Hotmail and Yahoo mail as well as from many ISP emails and other included email services.
For the premium email market and the demanding email users Gmail is less of a threat as they will hold people into their business model.
Gmail will suffer from growth related pain like every other email service I know of have done. I therefore advice to have a wait and see approach to Gmail for 6-12 months and them make up status.

Hans J Lysglimt
www.lysglimt.com