GMail has done what so many years of competition from smaller companies could not (there are many services out there which offer more than 4 megs of email space!). For years Yahoo! users were stuck with email storage space as small as 4 Megs (I am an old timer and had 6 Megs). And considering the file sizes of documents and images in today’s scenario, 4 megabyte is too little. Especially since there is no POP/IMAP supports in the free version so that the user can download the mails on their computers. So either the users had to suffer by deleting their old mails or upgrade to paid accounts.

GMail changed all this. They launched a preview release with 1 GB mail space which was as much as 250 times the space offered by the Yahoo! mail. And Yahoo! has responded back. Today they increased the email space for the free users from 4 Megs to a pretty decent 100 Megs. It was accompanied with a new interface for the mail and the homepage. A few of the new sections are in fact CSS based! Though the support for alternate browsers like Opera is still a bit jerky.

So, have they countered the GMail threat? I doubt it. I still find GMail more usable. Not because it has 10 times the storage space! But because of the mail specific features. Yahoo! Mail still has the stupid restrictions on the number of filters and blocked address. The mail searching feature is not very good (though it is reported that they are working on it) and interface is still on the heavy side. Checking and sending mails is slower than on the GMail platform. GMail scores on speed and features like conversations. It changes the way we look at mail. This makes it different from all the webmail services out there!

Still there is some good news for Yahoo! The increased storage space for email will let them keep those users who use Yahoo! for the integrated package. Mail, photos, briefcase, notes et all. Google will have to work much harder if it wants to compete on the complete package. But for someone like me who used Yahoo! only for its email, GMail rocks baby!