The Hindu Business Line : Gmail space: One, two,... Infinity?

We are talking about Google's e-mail service Gmail's announcement for its first birthday: Google would like to offer infinite storage to Gmail users! Now hold on, they would only like to. But what they are going to do is to increase the e-mail storage limit to 2 GB for all users.

What can you do with 2 GB? Well, for one thing, you can forget about checking your e-mail this summer holiday and not be bothered about your e-mail account bouncing messages because you don't have enough free space.

But seriously, looking at the amount of e-mail we receive - from work, friends and from people we don't know, and from people we don't want to know - it is surprising that we got along with whatever storage limit we used to have before Gmail came along.

Gmail changed the rules of the game, and everyone who is someone is now playing according to the new rules, except for Hotmail. Rediff now offers 1 GB and Yahoo! offers 250 MB. Now, you can just forget to panic about space.

Another major feature is free POP access and automatic mail forwarding. POP access is the technology that allows you to check your Webmail account from a desktop email program such as Outlook, Outlook Express, or Thunderbird.

This is a nice feature because you can keep a record of your important messages and replies on your computer.

Automatic mail forwarding is a feature where every e-mail message that you receive in your Gmail account will be forwarded to another e-mail account specified by you. How is this useful? Suppose you are travelling and can't or won't access the Gmail account you use for work, but want to forward the messages to a colleague, you can do that without having to disclose your account information.

There are a couple of other nifty features (no, that's not Nifty Futures): A mail notifier which will let you know when new messages arrive along with the sender and subject information; and a rich text formatting option that lets you add colour and highlight text apart from what you can do with WordPad (in Windows).

Google, as usual, has again managed to raise the bar for the provision and expectations from common Internet tasks.

It is a good thing for the consumer when other companies follow, and even better if they try to go one up on Google.

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page

Stories in this Section
BPO revenues to touch $134 b in 2005: Gartner

Shorter calls to cost less as BSNL rejigs PCO biz

DoT relaxes penalty for delayed licence fee payment

MindTree revenues rise 80 per cent

Mauritius — paving the way to become a cyber island

Caritor has faith in in-house HR team

Maars Soft debenture issue

IntraNet partners FSS

Oracle tools in Gartner Quadrant

Gmail space: One, two,... Infinity?

SCR Web site on claims

Juniper targets Wi-Fi, security applications