WORLD WIDE WEB E-mail services expand to compete with Gmail inbox

By MIKE LANGBERG
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
E-mail is going through a huge change this year, as providers race to stay ahead of the much-anticipated launch of Google's free Gmail service.
Gmail will offer a massive 1 gigabyte inbox. Established players are responding with big increases in their free inboxes, while unknowns are trying to make a name for themselves.
Two small companies are already offering free 1 gigabyte inboxes in the United States: Spymac (www.spymac.com) started April 5, just four days after Google revealed the existence of Gmail. Walla Communications (www.walla.com) became the second entrant on July 7.
This turmoil is good news for free Web e-mail users, who can escape the tiny confines of 2 or 4 megabyte inboxes that in some cases could overflow with just a few dozen messages. A gigabyte is 1,000 megabytes, enough room to store perhaps 50,000 short, text-only messages.
But there are also risks. There's no guarantee free e-mail providers -- particularly the smaller ones -- will endure, raising the possibility of shutdowns that could block users from months or years of stored messages. And none of the free e-mail sites are giving users the tools they need to manage huge inboxes -- at least not yet.
Keeping up with Google
Google, the Mountain View, Calif., company that has Silicon Valley in a tizzy over its upcoming initial public stock offering, had been dropping hints about a free e-mail service for months before announcing Gmail on April 1.
Gmail is now moving through an invitation-only testing process. It's not clear when the doors will officially open, or what features may be added before then.
Knowing that Gmail is coming, the rest of the industry has moved quickly, including the two dominant players: Yahoo (http://mail.yahoo.com) and Microsoft's Hotmail (www.hotmail.com).
On June 15, Yahoo increased the size of free inboxes to 100 MB, one-tenth of 1 GB, from 4 MB. For a reasonable fee of $19.99 a year, the inbox swells to an awesome 2 GB -- twice the size of Gmail -- and users are spared the annoying billboard-style ads that otherwise plague Yahoo and most free services.
On June 25, Microsoft said it would expand Hotmail's free inbox to 250 MB before year-end from 2 MB. For $19.95 a year, undercutting Yahoo by all of 4 cents, users get 2 GB. The company has not yet given an exact date for the upgrade.
Spymac and Walla are offering 1 GB for free now to build market share before Gmail sucks all the air out of the room.
Gmail seems best
The tactic may not work. I spent several days trying Spymac and Walla; I've also had an invitation-only Gmail test account for two months. Gmail, in short, blows them away. Unless Google somehow manages to make the final product worse than what it's previewing now, which seems extremely unlikely, then Gmail is definitely worth the wait.
Walla Mail has a clean interface, with only a single banner ad on each page, but lacks such basic features as filters for sorting incoming mail that have long been available in Yahoo and Hotmail.
Spymac was unreliable for me. I got repeated error messages when I first tried to set up an account, but got through doing the exact same thing a day later. Last week, I encountered more error messages when trying to access my inbox -- an outage that lasted for half a day.
Spymac, based in New York and Lethbridge, Alberta, started as an online forum for Macintosh users. The company was small and apparently successful, with about 50,000 registered users, before launching 1 GB free e-mail in early April. The number of registered users has since ballooned to 600,000.
Such rapid growth can be dangerous for a small company, generating big costs and support headaches well before additional revenues flow in from advertising or users who upgrade to premium services. I spoke to a Spymac executive last week who assured me the company can handle the strain, but the outages I encountered make me dubious.
Full mailbox
Meanwhile, all the services I've mentioned above are hiding a ticking time bomb: What to do when your gigantic mailbox gets near to full.
Gmail's sign-in page (http://gmail.google.com) proclaims: "Gmail is an experiment in a new kind of Web mail, built on the idea that you should never have to delete mail ... (with 1 GB) of free storage so you'll never need to delete another message."
Never say never. Even the biggest inbox will fill up someday, at which point you're blocked from receiving or sending more messages. Most of us regularly receive big messages, with embedded pictures or attached files such as spreadsheets and music files. An active user might fill a 1 GB inbox in a year or two.
It will be agonizing to figure out which messages to delete among 10,000 or 30,000 or 50,000, especially when the free e-mail services today are limited to manual message-by-message deletion.
What's needed are tools for managing bulk deletion, such as features to erase all messages older than a certain date or erase all messages from specified senders.
I asked representatives of Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Walla and Spymac about this. They acknowledged the problem, and said they would implement solutions before most people get anywhere near their limits.
I hope so, because free Web e-mail is a valuable service -- even if users have to put up with exposure to ads -- that's getting much better with the arrival of Gmail.