A Few More Thoughts About Free Email Accounts

Over the last week, my posts about emails accounts have generated quite a few visitors, so I thought I would post a few additional thoughts.

First, both Yahoo! and Hotmail advertise that they offer unlimited storage. However, when you read the fine print, these offers are conditioned upon "reasonable usage." What is reasonable? Yahoo! and Hotmail, respectively, are the sole decider of reasonableness with respect to the accounts of their users - and there is no appeal. It seems to me that these companies could legitimately argue that anything above a few gigabytes of email storage exceeds a "reasonable" amount of storage.

Second, yes, I realize that Gmail's account space is "always growing." For the first few years, Gmail provided reasonable growth. However, that growth has slowed to such a slow rate that it's not even useful. Currently, Gmail grows at a rate of approximately 0.0144 MB/h. That's nothing (I think of that as about one newsletter a week; at this rate it will take about 20 years for Gmail to hit 10 GB of storage space). Back in 2007, the rate of growth was approximately 5.37 MB/h. That was real growth that I was excited about. Realistically, users should just consider their Gmail account storage space stuck at a fixed amount of approximately 7.5 GB.

Third, a free web-based email account is only as secure as the company that maintains it. For example, if you have a free email with Lycos and Lycos goes bankrupt or decides that it can no longer financially support the service, your email is gone. Let's be honest, Yahoo! isn't providing a lot of comfort about the long term security of its free services. Yahoo! closed all Geocities accounts earlier this year. Yahoo! gave its users reason to panic this week as internet rumors from respected sources persist that many of Yahoo's free services will be shut down or merged with other products (no, email is not rumored to impacted).

Fourth, am I the only person concerned that Google's global invasion of privacy may cause severe financial ramifications which may negatively impact Gmail?

Finally, as noted in a previous post, I over-analyze the weirdest things.