In the battle of mail storage, Windows live mail has just announced that their Windows Live Mail Plus will be $19.99 for 4GB of storage. That is 2 GB more than what Yahoo! Mail Plus has to offer for the same price. So for now, Windows Live Mail Plus sits as King of the Hill. Other features that you can expect from Live Mail Plus:
- Attachments up to 20MB
- No advertisements (across several Windows Live services, including Mail, Mail desktop and Spaces)
- Microsoft Outlook access
- No disabling of your account due to inactivity
Unless the advertisements really get to you (although hardly noticeable), most people will be satisfied with Gmail and their 2.8GB (and rising at 4 bytes per second) of storage, or even Yahoo’s 1.0GB of storage. Below is a more detailed comparison of free services:
AIM Mail (Free)
- Storage – 2GB
- Attachment Size – 16 MB
Hotmail (Free) (to be replaced by Windows Live Mail)
- Storage – 1 GB
- Attachment Size – 10 MB
Gmail (Free- in beta)
- Storage – 2.8GB+
- Attachment Size – 10 MB
Yahoo! Mail (Free)
- Storage – 1GB
- Attachment Size – 10MB
There really aren’t many major differences between paid or free services, it really is a matter of preference. I’m pretty satisfied with Gmail as my primary account, although I do have a Hotmail, and Yahoo account as well. Disappointingly, Windows Live accounts are still not available to folks in the United States (The original rumored release date to the public was way back on June 20th!).
[mail.lycos.com]
Free Account: 3GB
Paid Account ($19.95/year): 5GB
I guess that’s per year?
If I’m going to pay for email service I want something more for my money than just additional email storage space (I don’t count removing ads because Adblock Plus does that already). I want file storage, sharing, and backup, plus an RSS reader build into the mail client like News Gator’s Outlook plugin.
Why haven’t RSS readers been build into the web based mail clients? It seems like it’s an easy way to better target advertisements.
Yahoo Mail Beta has a built in RSS Reader.
It boggles my mind why Google keeps Gmail separated from a lot of their services. It sounds like a no brainer for them to integrate Google Reader into it which would also make it easier for people to stay on top of their news. But as Max mentioned Yahoo! Mail Beta does have a built-in RSS reader that is pretty decent.
Could it be Google is too busy looking for other serivces (including itself) to buy to do any type of re-engering on their own products?
[quote]It boggles my mind why Google keeps Gmail separated from a lot of their services. It sounds like a no brainer for them to integrate Google Reader into it which would also make it easier for people to stay on top of their news. But as Max mentioned Yahoo! Mail Beta does have a built-in RSS reader that is pretty decent.[/quote]
My only guess is that a majority of people still have no idea what RSS means, or does. So Google probably doesn’t think it’s missing out on anything here.
I know from my own circle of family and friends, that, while everyone has an e-mail account, very few, if any, keep track of RSS feeds.
Google probably thinks that it has bigger fish to fry.
If RSS really takes hold, which I believe it will, integration of e-mail and RSS will surely occur.
But steps need to be taken to help RSS catch on and integrating it into Gmail would probably open the service up to a lot of people who have never heard about it.