The Gmail Ripple Effect

With the advent of Google's Gmail, a multitude of search engines, portals, and general-purpose sites have followed suit by offering enhanced email services, including increasing storage capacities. Discuss Gmail's effect on the email industry at Gmail. The service, while offering the standard bells and whistles found on most other email providers, did boast a tantalizing feature that, up until that point, had been unheard of: an online storage amount of 1 gigabyte. Gmail's beta launch caused a personification of the ripple affect, not all of it directed at the storage capacity. In order to "pay" for this venture, Google announced that Gmail mailings would feature contextually placed ads that appear as a result of Gmail scanning emails, and then positioning them accordingly. Google's actions with Gmail caused the rest of the email world to take notice as well as action. Soon after the launch of Gmail, numerous sites popped up offering email accounts with large storage capacities. Established email service providers, like Yahoo and MSN's Hotmail, reacted as well. The first company to jump into the email wave was Gmail's about page: 6. Does Gmail support automatic forwarding and POP3 access? Not at the moment In the future you will be able to access Gmail messages from non-Gmail accounts for free or at a nominal fee. A month or so after Gmail's beta and Spymac's operational services launched, Lycos and Walla! Communications announced they would be offering email services that would include the exalted gigabyte storage amount. The AventureMail membership is akin to the horse being led by the carrot. On their home page, Aventure offers 2 types of service, paid and unpaid. Both services allocate a whopping 2 gigabytes of storage. However, AventureMail appears to have put a cap on the amount of free members it will accept. If you try to sign up for its free membership, you are MSN's Hotmail, two of the most popular email services on the Internet. Each company practically mimicked each other in the updating of storage amounts and email services. Both portals offer two types of memberships, unpaid and paid. Unpaid members receive a nominal storage upgrade (100MB for Yahoo members, 250MB for Hotmail), while the both paid services offer users 2 gigabytes for $19.95 a year. Each service also allows 10MB attachments. Last, but definitely not least, latest search news.