Infinite e-mail service in finite

In spite of the unlimited expansion process of free mailboxes for users, prepared webmail services come to a lull time to prepare for a new development phase.

" The industry is also cyclical. We are at the end of a phase initiated by Gmail ," said Joe Laszlo, an analyst with Jupiter Research (USA).

Yahoo recently announced that since May, all Yahoo Mail customers' accounts will have unlimited storage. AOL has done this since September last year, while Google has steadily increased the size of the mailbox and has now reached 2.8 GB per user.

Only 3 years ago, most free mail service providers applied very limited capacity, usually in the range of 2 MB to 10 MB. That fact forces users to regularly delete or download content to the PC hard drive instead of storing it in the mailbox located on the provider's server.

Things began to change when Google made a breakthrough in April 2004 with the launch of a 1 GB Gmail service, which was considered "unprecedented" at the time. The race to increase the amount of accounts for customers has since started.

Many people believe that increasing capacity is good but not necessarily necessary compared to priorities such as security against spam status, phishing scams and spyware, adware. The majority of users claim that the current webmail services are not merely playing the role of receiving / sending messages. With huge capacity, each account has become an online personal storage portal, which contains everything from documents, contacts, personal financial statements, invoices, photos and movies. .

Increasing the capacity of course will make it easier for users to store information and to avoid having to delete old documents to make room for new content. However, this is somewhat similar to a double-edged sword if the service provider does not supplement the utility of organizing, sorting information and instructing the user to exploit the service in the simplest way. . Expanding the account size means that the amount of storage content will increase, the mailbox is likely to become a huge mess bin. At that time, people could store all the e-mails of the past five years but could not find what they needed when they got a job.

The nature of service providers continuously increases account capacity to retain customers. When there is a bigger mailbox, people store more things and it will be hard to give up that account when you have stored a lot of personal information inside. The process of increasing the account capacity for customers is entirely beneficial to the suppliers because the current storage costs are now sharply reduced, only worth a small percentage compared to the previous 5 years, while the revenue from advertising constantly increasing.

In the face of the need to share images and video clips of everyday consumers, the next step of the competition to expand e-mail services would be to increase the size of mail attachments. Current attachment capacity ranges from 10 MB to 60 MB, depending on the supplier. However, if the recipient's e-mail is not a strong service, the upgrade on the sender's side is also meaningless.

Although ensuring unlimited mailboxes, suppliers are always repeating the "regulations on preventing abuse of mail accounts", in which customers are advised not to use free storage space. things not related to e-mail. " We give our customers unlimited capacity to use for official purposes of email, ie exchange information, content, including multimedia content, but not to turn mailboxes. into an extra hard drive , "said Yahoo vice president John Kremer.