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Wednesday, March 31, 2004
A Good Gig if You Can Get It: Google to Launch Web-Based Email
Yahoo! dumps Google. MSN guns for Google. So... Google launches a service that directly competes with those two companies' wildly popular Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail services. The gloves are off.
According to tonight's press release and several breaking news items, Google's long-rumored email service is being tested tonight by 1,000 users. You knew that Google wouldn't enter this space without making plans to do something a little different. True to form, they've kicked it up a notch, reportedly offering a gigabyte's worth of storage. That's ten times more storage than the largest premium Yahoo Mail inbox, which costs $59.99 a year. I'll be one of Google's first customers. With my storage needs and lazy "archive everything" policy -- and I suspect many others are in the same position -- Yahoo's 100MB just isn't enough (seems like just a few months ago I was saying the same thing about the 50MB).
Along with offering tens of millions of web-based email users a potentially better, cheaper, faster product, this will provide Google advertisers with a fairly sizeable additional channel for targeted keyword ads as users flock to sign up for "GMail."
Like the established players, Google also promises that Gmail will help users fight spam. Time will tell if they've come up with any new wrinkles here beyond the usual Bayesian filters, challenge-response, and related anti-spam methods.
Posted by
Andrew Goodman
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D'oh!
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