Let The Email Wars Begin

Things just got a lot hotter in the hyper-competitive worldof online email providers.In response to Google's announcement that their soon-to-be-launched "Gmail" service will offer users 1 gigabyte ofemail storage, Yahoo! announced an upgrade of their freeemail service to allow users 100MB of free email storagealong with other enhancements.Microsoft's Hotmail will surely also announce a freeupgrade in email storage space.On the surface it might just appear like a simple case ofone-upmanship, but it actually represents major forcesdigging in online and preparing to do battle.It appears Yahoo! simply wanted to take the issue of emailstorage space off the table as a consideration for users asto which email service to choose.Google enjoyed considerable media and public attention overthe past few weeks with the media marveling at how Googleintended to give hundreds of megabytes more space to itsusers than Yahoo! or Hotmail.With this move, Yahoo! made storage a "non-issue," but thereal war has only just begun.Email ranks as the number one most popular online activityaccording to virtually any survey you care to read.When people go online, they spend the single biggest chunkof their time sending, receiving, and reading email.Online email providers understand that eyeballs on a pagelooking at advertising and responding to offers is whatmakes them money.By increasing loyalty among email users in order torepeatedly draw them back to the same website (oftenseveral times a day), email service providers like Yahoo!,Hotmail and Google can keep people looking at revenuegenerating ads.Despite the best efforts of government regulators, privateorganizations, software filters, ISP's and others, overhalf of all email sent online rates as unsolicitedcommercial email (SPAM).Besides storage space, Google, Yahoo! and Hotmail willstart claiming that their spam filters rate better than therest.These online powerhouses hope to attract users with thepromise of cutting down and even eliminating the avalancheof get-rich-quick, pornography, and ink-jet cartridgeoffers (among others) that bombard virtually anyone with anemail account more than 15 minutes old.This will, however, lead to another problem that many ofthem won't talk about, which involves filtering legitimateemail as spam.Unfortunately, the sword cuts both ways on this issue.So where does it all end? Never! Hotmail will enter thefray with expanded storage capacity as well as the promiseof less spam and a more "friendly" interface to make youremail life even easier.Yahoo! and Hotmail will most likely copy Google and startserving context sensitive advertising based on the contentof each email message as it get viewed.Privacy advocates will weigh in to claim that all of thefiltering and serving of ads based on an email message'scontent violates our rights to privacy and heralds thearrival of "Big Brother."But all this jockeying for position and enticing users fromone email service to another actually represents a greatboon for the average Internet user.It will force three of the Web's biggest players to wake upand improve their services after 2 or 3 years of "businessas usual" and we can all expect a few valuable innovationsto result.