The Freemail Wars

Can Google's new Gmail service give the freemail giants a run for their money? Angus Kidman Investigates.

Free email accounts (often known as ‘freemail’) have been popular for almost as long as the World Wide Web itself. The principle is simple: you access your email from a Web site, using an address and password of your choice. The service is provided at no cost to the consumer; the freemail providers make their money by selling banner advertisements on those pages.

Freemail provides a simple and cheap way of experimenting with email for Internet beginners. It has also proved popular among travellers, who can easily access their mail from any Internet cafe, and with families where each member wants their own private email account. While many of these features are also available with the email accounts offered by Internet service providers (ISPs), freemail remains a popular choice.

Even if you do have an email account with your ISP or one that works via your own business or personal domain name, it can still be handy to have a freemail account as well. Using a freemail address when you post to Internet newsgroups or buy goods online can minimise the amount of spam you receive in your main account, for example.

The best-known freemail service remains Hotmail (now owned by Microsoft), which has 4.1 million active users in Australia alone. Other well-known providers include Yahoo! and Lycos. While the extra features offered, such as access to calendars and reminders, vary slightly between sites, most of these providers have had fairly similar offerings — at least until April, when popular search engine Google announced plans to enter the market with a service called ‘Gmail’.

The initial attraction of Gmail was its hugely expanded storage capacity. Most freemail accounts have a storage limit of about 2M, which is generous if you’re only sending written messages. However, it can quickly fill up if, for instance, cousin Kevin sends you dozens of photos from his cruising holiday. Once you exceed the limit, all incoming messages are rejected until you create more space by deleting mail.

Gmail promises its users 1G of storage — more than anyone is ever likely to consume with normal activity. Google’s creators argue that this means no-one will ever need to delete a message. Google also wants to use its search technologies to make it easy to sort through existing messages, which will be fairly important if you do decide to keep every message you’ve ever sent and received.

According to Google co-founder Sergey Brin, the idea for Gmail came from a Google searcher who complained to the company about how hard it was to manage existing mail. “If a Google user has a problem with email, well, so do we,” Brin said. “And while developing Gmail was a bit more complicated than we anticipated, we’re pleased to be able to offer it to the user who asked for it.”

So, what’s the catch? Well, there turn out to be two. Firstly, Google will include text advertisements based on the content of your email (similar to the ads that appear based on your search terms if you use its Web search service). Many people probably won’t care about this, but privacy advocates have expressed concern that it may cause problems, especially if inappropriate advertisements are served up.

Secondly, despite being announced, Gmail remains in a state of beta testing, meaning that only selected customers have been invited to use it. At the time of going to press, no launch date for the service had been announced.

However, Gmail’s existing rivals have already reacted to the announcement by enhancing their own services. Midway through June, Yahoo! announced that it was increasing the available capacity on its freemail service from 6M to 100M. While not quite as generous as Gmail, that increase will still mean most users don’t need to worry about regularly cleaning out their inbox, according to Rachel Watt, senior producer for mail at Yahoo! Australia and New Zealand.

“We get a lot of feedback from users,” Watt told NetGuide. “The three big things that come up are spam, viruses and wanting more storage space.”

Notably, storage is only third on that list, and fighting spam remains a key priority for Yahoo!. “We know that the longer a consumer has an email account, the more likely they are to be targets for unwanted email, which is why we are constantly finetuning our spam controls to tighten the noose around the necks of spammers,” Watt said.

Yahoo! has also enhanced its email search services, but won’t be following the Gmail path of customising advertisements to individual messages. However, Watt believes most consumers are generally quite happy to accept advertising: “There’s a better understanding that you’re getting a great service, and that has to be paid for in some capacity.”

Just a week after Yahoo!, Hotmail also announced its own capacity update. While the amount on offer is even more generous — 250M — the fact that the service, like Gmail, wasn’t available immediately after the announcements suggests that Hotmail’s strategy was motivated, at least in part, by the need to keep up with its rivals.

Dominic Finnegan, director of consumer services for Ninemsn, which runs Hotmail in Australia, said that the large increase in capacity (Hotmail previously had a 2M limit) meant that no-one would need to worry about storage anymore. “The vast majority of our users will now have more than enough,” he said. Customers who do want more have the option of paying about $30 a year for Hotmail Plus, which eliminates advertisements and offers a Gmail-baiting 2G of storage.

Concurring with Yahoo!, Finnegan said that spam remains the biggest concern for users. Hotmail currently blocks about 3 billion unwanted messages a day, necessitating constant upgrades to minimise the amount of spam that actually reaches users.

Managing that spam tide will be one challenge that Gmail will need to overcome before it is taken seriously. However, if the service proves successful, then the features battle between freemail providers is likely to continue — and that should ultimately be to the benefit of all Internet users.


Pros and cons of freemail

Here are five good reasons to use a freemail account:

• It’s easily accessed from any machine with a Net connection.

• You can set up accounts for multiple family members.

• Using a freemail account when online shopping makes it less likely that you’ll get spam to your main account.

• Most providers offer automatic spam and virus filtering.

• There’s no need to change your email address if you switch ISPs.



But there are reasons to stick with an account from your ISP. Here are five of them:

• You can’t usually access a freemail account using a desktop email program like Outlook Express.

• Access to email is only available when you are connected.

• It’s not easy to create backup of email files

• You need to sign in regularly to maintain account access, which can be a problem if you are sick or go on holidays.

• Advertising on freemail sites may be intrusive.

Taken from http://netguide.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=18926