August 15th, 2007
Microsoft Tops Google in Email Storage
By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews
Although they both trail Yahoo and its unlimited email storage, Microsoft leapfrogged over Google today by increasing its mail storage to 5GB.
The limit for a free Windows Live Hotmail account will increase from 2GB to 5GB. The change will be rolled out to users over the next few weeks along with a series of other upgrades, wrote Ellie Powers-Boyle, a Microsoft program manager, on a company blog.
Google offers around 2.8GB of storage space for a free account. Last week, Google began selling storage space that can be used for either its Gmail or Picasa photo-sharing services for $20 a year for another 6GB. It also offers more expensive plans. Source; ComputerWorld
We Say: It’s all about the numbers. Honestly, I have never used a significant amount of my Gmail account. All these numbers are just selling points, and I really like a) Gmail’s conversation view, b) Gmail’s labeling system. Despite increases in both Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, I’m still likely to stick to Gmail.
Steve R says:
Agree with Michael about Gmail just being more usable. Not only the convo view and the great labelling, but also:
Gmail is usable on my smartphone. Yahoo’s new ajax version isn’t, and their old version is unspeakably awful on the phone.
Gmail includes the chat facility in the mail program — that’s actually handy sometimes for upping the bandwidth to an ongoing conversation
Gmail image attachments are much nicer to send and receive than Yahoo. It takes several clicks and decisions to see a photo sent to me in Yahoo still.
Gmail office attachments now can be viewed as html, or as Google docs, or brought up in Office, each with a click.
And someone actually thought about the Gmail interface. If you click “reply” in any mail in a Gmail conversation, you send a mail to the other person. Do that in Yahoo and half the time you’re sending mail to yourself. Boo. Hiss.
August 15th, 2007 at 3:39 am
John says:
gmail is my preferred e-mail. Been using it since its release. In fact my hotmail account was deactivated for inactivity.
a few weeks ago my gmail password was changed. I didn’t have the original e-mail when I signed up and could not remember any of the security questions / answers. I lost this e-mail account. Gmail support would not help.
August 15th, 2007 at 10:40 am
Another Mike says:
I’m on the fence when it comes to choosing a single mail provider. I actively use all 3 popular webmail providers(yahoo, hotmail live, and gmail)
I really like yahoo’s interface for normal mail activities. Dragging, sane hotkeys and nice visual cues just work. But totally unusable on older computers.
Hotmail live has the best mix. Dragging, a decent layout and is quite fast for a full ajax app. Hotkeys need work and it’s ads suck(thank god for adblock). I don’t use it that often though because their spam filters are the worst I have ever seen. I’ve managed but they seriously need to rework them.
Gmail has a very cool system. Labels, easy reply’s, workable filters, and an interface that I can use anywhere. But if I want to click on a new message somewhere in my inbox I have to go back to my inbox insead of having a list of my mail on the left like hotmail live.
Oh well, no one is perfect and I have uses for each and all of my addresses.
August 15th, 2007 at 12:03 pm