Gmail for all

I was going to post about how difficult it is getting to filter spam, but since Google does such a good job of it, I’ll post about their mail service. Gmail, which until now could only be used after an invitation from an existing user, is now available for open registration.

If you remember, it was Google that made the jump to providing very large mailboxes for free. What started off with an offering of a whopping 1GB of mail space, has now gone up to more than 2.81GB (and increasing, if you look at the login page). This much space is still uncommon even for companies that host their own mail setups (we have upgraded to 100MB quotas from the previous 10MB).

Here I should mention hasanshabbir.com, which belongs to Hasan, a friend of my cousin who runs his own mailing list. It has some controversial though interesting threads that include a lot of pictures and forwarded documents that would otherwise fill my mailbox really fast. It’s because of these being sent to my Gmail address that I can stay subscribed and keep some of the more interesting posts.

Now that it is open to all, Gmail should pose a serious threat to both Yahoo Mail and Hotmail who are still struggling to provide the same features and integration that Google provides with its services.

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