From Monday, current and new subscribers to Spymac Mail will have access to the storage, according to the company. The free email accounts, which can be used with any operating system, do not rely on keyword scanning or advertising, it said in a posting on the Spymac site.
The launch could signal changes to the free email business Yahoo and Microsoft's Hotmail dominate. These Internet companies impose fees of between $10 and $50 (£5.47 and £27.36) a year for a much smaller amount of email storage. Yahoo subscribers, for example, get 100 megabytes of storage -- 10 times less than Spymac's free 1GB -- for $50.
"Yahoo and Hotmail may have to (give away more storage), if they want to stay in the game," said Kevin April, Spymac's co-founder and chief technology officer.
Spymac is trying to promote new Web hosting and auction services by giving away copious amounts of email storage. With roughly 47,000 members, the former Apple Macintosh gossip Web site is small potatoes, compared with Google and other freemail providers. But Spymac's move to offer more storage is among the first signs that the market is moving toward parity and indicates the relatively low cost of such a move.
Last week, Google shook the industry, when it said it would launch Gmail, a searchable Web-based email service with enough storage to let subscribers keep messages indefinitely. Google plans to support the service by scanning email and then delivering ads related to the content of messages. The initiative flagged a new direction for Google, while it also challenged the norm in the Web email market.
Yahoo and MSN have made few changes to their system interfaces in recent years, but they have sought to charge fees for feature upgrades such as added storage. Yahoo is starting to use storage upgrades in its promotions, advertising price breaks for added disk space. And last week, it sent an email promotion to selected subscribers, giving away 10MB.
April said it's relatively cheap to upgrade members to additional storage from the 25MB it had previously offered. He calculated that it would cost an average of $5 per person for 1GB of storage; that is, if the member were to use the entire allotted space.
A 1GB email account can store up to 8 billion bits of data, or the equivalent of 500,000 pages of messages, according to April.
He said the storage allotments will help bring in new members, which will support its paid advertising, professional Web hosting and auction services.
Talkback
This e-mail service form is very slow to create it is promising after you spend about 20 minutes with the six given steps to forward an e-mail with instructions. I have filled out the form on three different occassions and the e-mail never arrived. I also used three different e-mail accounts with no results I seriously doubt this is e-mail service is true.
I agree with Karlo. I opened account with spymac. Even after ten days, I can not import contacts nor change password. Out of 300 contacts from a csv file, only 7 are imported tyat too partially. If clicked on import, it opens up another widow asking for selection , which are totally confusing. I sent messages to help, with no response at all. Yahoo and hotmail respond almost immediately. What is the use of 1GB storage if you can not add contacts.
excuse your self i have been with yahoo canada for over 3 years and its been free it used to be 6mb but now its 100mb and its free, so ms reporter you better get you facts together, its free, not 50 dollare
Dear Mr. Sean Hayes you are evidently talking about yahoo and the talkback issue was about spymac service that by the way has improved enormously. Your topic about Yahoo has no relation with the previous comments.
haha sean hayes... you need some glasses man!!