Of the three main free email competitors, Google, Yahoo and MSN Hotmail, Google has several advantages (Gmail; Hild and Mitchell 11). First, it offers one gigabyte os storage space, compared to 2 GB at MSN and 4GB at Yahoo. This means you never have to discard any mail as you won't run out of storage space. Each messages is stored grouped with all its replies and displayed as a conversation. There is a Google search feature to find any message you want, no matter when it was sent. There are no popup ads or untargeted banner ads and you see only relevant text ads and links to related web pages of interest. Google email is web-based email so you can access it from any computer connected to the internet (Top). Google email also has highly effective spam filters.
MSN has only 2GB storage space and charges $29.99 per year for an extra 10 megabytes (Hild and Mitchell 8). However, it does allow users to check their mail from other accounts using POP mail services. MSN attracts a large amount of spam which gets through their filters, and a lot on unwanted junk mail, which caused it to start charging for chat room access in some countries. It has even considered charging a fee for sending email to stop spammers. There is no support for secure messaging either (Top). MSN's email management tools are not the best, and need upgrading. Yahoo offers 4GB and requires users to type in camouflaged letters before sending an email message to cut down on spam, and this is quite effective in preventing users sending spam to other systems, but does not control incoming spam from other addresses. Yahoo actively pursued international markets and in 2004 had 25 international sites using 13 languages.
Google decided to enter the free email market because, it says, part of its mission is to organize and present all the world's information, and they consider email part of that information that is not being well-organized at present (Fest...