Let The Email Wars Begin

© Jim Edwards - All Rights reserved

http://www.thenetreporter.com

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Things just got a lot hotter in the hyper-competitive world

of online email providers.



In response to Google's announcement that their soon-to-be-

launched "Gmail" service will offer users 1 gigabyte of

email storage, Yahoo! announced an upgrade of their free

email service to allow users 100MB of free email storage

along with other enhancements.



Microsoft's Hotmail will surely also announce a free

upgrade in email storage space.



On the surface it might just appear like a simple case of

one-upmanship, but it actually represents major forces

digging in online and preparing to do battle.



It appears Yahoo! simply wanted to take the issue of email

storage space off the table as a consideration for users as

to which email service to choose.



Google enjoyed considerable media and public attention over

the past few weeks with the media marveling at how Google

intended to give hundreds of megabytes more space to its

users than Yahoo! or Hotmail.



With this move, Yahoo! made storage a "non-issue," but the

real war has only just begun.



Email ranks as the number one most popular online activity

according to virtually any survey you care to read.



When people go online, they spend the single biggest chunk

of their time sending, receiving, and reading email.



Online email providers understand that eyeballs on a page

looking at advertising and responding to offers is what

makes them money.



By increasing loyalty among email users in order to

repeatedly draw them back to the same website (often

several times a day), email service providers like Yahoo!,

Hotmail and Google can keep people looking at revenue

generating ads.



Despite the best efforts of government regulators, private

organizations, software filters, ISP's and others, over

half of all email sent online rates as unsolicited

commercial email (SPAM).



Besides storage space, Google, Yahoo! and Hotmail will

start claiming that their spam filters rate better than the

rest.



These online powerhouses hope to attract users with the

promise of cutting down and even eliminating the avalanche

of get-rich-quick, pornography, and ink-jet cartridge

offers (among others) that bombard virtually anyone with an

email account more than 15 minutes old.



This will, however, lead to another problem that many of

them won't talk about, which involves filtering legitimate

email as spam.



Unfortunately, the sword cuts both ways on this issue.



So where does it all end? Never! Hotmail will enter the

fray with expanded storage capacity as well as the promise

of less spam and a more "friendly" interface to make your

email life even easier.



Yahoo! and Hotmail will most likely copy Google and start

serving context sensitive advertising based on the content

of each email message as it get viewed.



Privacy advocates will weigh in to claim that all of the

filtering and serving of ads based on an email message's

content violates our rights to privacy and heralds the

arrival of "Big Brother."



But all this jockeying for position and enticing users from

one email service to another actually represents a great

boon for the average Internet user.



It will force three of the Web's biggest players to wake up

and improve their services after 2 or 3 years of "business

as usual" and we can all expect a few valuable innovations

to result.



About the Author:



Jim Edwards, a.k.a. TheNetReporter.com, is a syndicated newspaper

columnist, nationally recognized speaker, author, and web developer.

Owner of nine (9) successful e-businesses as well as a professional

consulting firm, Jim's writing comes straight off the front lines

of the Internet and e-commerce.



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