indi + rani = noe | kei

I know, I know, I'm a bit late in highlighting the war between three biggest webmail provider: Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail. But this week it becomes quite interesting.

As you might have known, three months ago Yahoo announced that it gave unlimited email storage, and they began to phase in the mailbox upgrade. In June, I became one of the lucky customer who gets unlimited storage.

Then, I just discovered that today Hotmail is increasing their mailbox size to 5GB, dwarfing Gmail 2.8 GB mailbox! Admittedly Hotmail is a bit late in jumping into mailbox upsizing bandwagon, but when they do it, they seems to intend to surpass Google.

Nevertheless, the upsizing measure by yahoo and hotmail is not compelling enough to make me sway back to their service. I'm currently a happy user of Gmail because:

• Gmail's spam filtering is fabulous
• Gmail offers pop3/smtp access for free
• Gmail allows me to access my other pop3 mailbox with ease and for free, and additionally, enable me to send mail as if I'm accessing my original pop3 account, allowing me to organize my different emails from one centralized location
• Gmail works well with MSGTAG service
• Gmail allow me to preview attachments without having to launch the full application
• It has versatile searching and flexible tagging capability
• Despite having ads, Gmail offers clean, sleek, interface
• Accessing Gmail from my mobile phone is a breeze
• I love the conversation display. It just make sense to read emails like that (too bad my desktop email organizer, Outlook, cannot do it as smoothly as Gmail)

Some people would argue and scream about lack of privacy in Gmail. But hey, nowadays, you can never be totally private, can you? Who says that yahoo and hotmail keeps your email in better privacy compared to Gmail? I think all of them are essentially the same, putting the email service onto the corporate hands. Perhaps the only perfectly private way to email privacy is to buy a dedicated server hardware, plug it into your home network, and set up a mail server protocol there, isn't it?

Anyway, Gmail seems to be responding fast to upsizing war. They slowly phase in 9GB of mailbox size to its customers. Moreover, Gmail also offers paid mailbox service in order to upgrade your mailbox up to 250GB. Let's just hope that this is true, and let's hope that this service spill over to the Google apps service, which I also use a lot.

Competition is good!