Google has announced that it's going to start it's own free e-mail service.
Google, the company that emerged from nowhere to become the dominant internet search engine, yesterday turned up the heat further on rivals Yahoo! and Microsoft by announcing plans to launch a free email service.
The service, Gmail, will provide far greater capacity than the existing services from Yahoo! and Microsoft's MSN Hotmail as well as a series of additional features. The company is in the course of testing the service with a handful of users.
A user account will have one gigabyte of space, roughly 500,000 pages of email. Gmail users will be able to receive up to 10 megabytes in a single e-mail - more than the free services of Yahoo! and Microsoft's Hotmail allow for storage in an entire mailbox.
Google said Gmail users would be able to search emails by sender, topic or other keywords and organise them according to conversational threads. Google claimed it would have better anti-spam filters than its rivals, a key selling point for all providers.
But there will be a drawback. Google hopes to make money from the service by programming its servers to pick up key words in emails and deliver related advertising in the messages. An email about a concert might include a link from a ticketing agency, for instance.
I've been yearning for a free e-mail service that would actually provide some service. My current e-mail provider throws at least 5 pop-up ads at me every session, plus has an advertisement page that you have to click through two to three times as you're checking your mail. It's high time.