Let's fastfoward to today, where the internet is in somewhat of a recovery mode when it is coming to advertising. Advertising is picking up once again, but is there really any money when it comes to offering free services like email?

Hotmail and Yahoo were by far the kings of the free email account services, if you needed to check your email on the go, or you wanted you own private email address where you didn't care that you got spam then you would signup for a free account. But what is it now that is making everyone scramble for free accounts when things were just as good before all this controversy about Gmail offered by Google that is making all the other companies trying to fight for your free email?

Ofcourse there is not such thing as something being truly free. With Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail or whoever else that offers free email, there is always advertising involved. Those ads are paying for part or all the space that is being required. News shocked the world when Google was offering 1 GB of email space for absolutely nothing! Think of it if each email took 1KB of space than you can have over 1 billion emails in your bin and you would hit the limit, but it makes you wonder, if thousands of people sign up, how can one company get enough free space to satisfy all its clients?

Email is a very important part of one's daily internet activity. The advantages of using these free email accounts is no matter where you are you can access those accounts where as a POP account you are stuck with downloading only the new messages from your ISP. So portability of your email is one of the advantages of using a free service.

With all the hype about Gmail being the next big email competition to the likes of MS's Hotmail, and Yahoo's free accounts, it makes you wonder what is the point. Gmail is offering 1 GB of email, Hotmail will now increase its free limit to 250 MB of space, which is strange in the fact that not too long ago before the Gmail hype that you would actually have to pay for more space for your account. Yahoo currently offers 100 MB of space for free and if you upgrade to their Plus version, you can get a whopping 2 GB of space, double of what Google is offering.

Is this really a battle of egos that is going on here? Who can signup more people to use their free service and in exchange snatch advertising revenue from their competition? It would sound like a great incentive, but these companies are all quite successful and wealthy but there should be more to this than meets the eye. But whoever you choose whether it is Yahoo, Hotmail or Google's Gmail (once it is readily available), it will come down to in the long run who can give the better service in regards to availabilty, features (spam blocking, virus protection) and most of all comfortability, no one wants to use something that is too complicated to figure out within seconds.

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Canadian Content Staff
Email: technology @ canadiancontent.net
http://www.canadiancontent.net/tech/