Good News On The Email Front
There has been good news on a couple of fronts recently for some users of email.
The first is that stiffening competition among the major providers of free web-based email service has led to more generous offers for their users.
Until April this year, those major players were Hotmail, and Yahoo, which both offered free email accounts a user could access from any computer with a web browser.
Those free accounts came with limited storage options, until Google
entered the fray touting its free Gmail service, which was to offer 1 Gigabyte of storage space, or enough to stash something in the order of 60 – 100 million medium-length plain-text newsletters.
But rather than sit there like a huge mass of yesterday’s fish-and-chip wrappers, the emails would also be searchable, and threaded so that conversations could be followed.
“Never lose a message again”, ran the blurb.
Google would pay for this service by delivering paid text ads, with links, which matched the content of emails. As a bonus, it would also presumably also use the information it gleaned from scanning the content in its search engine.
Soon after Gmail launched its beta, or trial version, accounts were
reportedly so much in demand that they were being auctioned for as much
as $US200 on eBay.
It still hasn’t officially launched, and no date has been set, but in the meantime Hotmail and Yahoo have ramped up their free offerings.
Yahoo increased its free account storage capacity from 4 to 100 megabytes, and Hotmail has more recently offered 250 megabytes of storage space, up from 2 megabytes.
Both also have paid account options, but since the main incentive for taking these up was increased storage space, it seems that these accounts may be on the way out.
More likely is that all of the major email providers will be forced to
start making their services pay by selling ads.
Also likely is that they’ll compete not only on storage capacity, but also on virus and spam filtering features, services which Yahoo and Hotmail offer already.
Which should be all be good news for the users of these services, typically travelers, or those who use one of these services as a secondary email address, or who don’t have access to their own computer or internet provider.
The other piece of good news relates to a small but probably significant victory in the war against mass emailing, or spam, which some estimates say accounts for as much as 70% of all email.
This month two spammers, Jeremy Jaynes, who was listed at spamhaus.org
as the 8th most prolific spammer in the world, and his sister Jessica
DeGroot, were convicted under a Virginia state law which bans the
practice.
Jaynes had grossed more than $24 million through sending more than 10,000 spam messages a day containing pornography or offering dubious products for sale.
The trial jury recommended he serve a nine-year prison sentence and DeGroot pay a $7500 fine.
The convictions may be important because the Virginia law applies to all internet traffic sent through computer servers based in the state.
Technology magazine Wired estimates that that accounts for more than 50%
of internet traffic, because America Online, which has millions of
subscribers, and about 1300 other internet technology companies are
based there.
So if the prosecutions stick under the expected appeals, the case may be a landmark in the battle to free up unprotected inboxes overrun by spam.
Which again, has got to be good for you.
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