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10 years of free e-mail

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CIOL Bureau
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Priya Padmanabhan

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BANGALORE: If there’s one killer application that helped in spreading Internet usage across the world, it is email.

And the credit for idea of a user accessing his or her e-mail account on the Internet from anywhere in the world, goes to the poster boy of the dotcom era, Sabeer Bhatia. His idea of Hotmail revolutionized the world of Internet communication. And now, it has reached a level of ubiquity that makes it hard to realize that this indispensable tool celebrated a decade of its existence this year.

While the email was invented by Ray Tomlinson way back in 1971, it took another 20 odd years before market forces and technology made it as widespread as it is today. In the pre-Hotmail era, users had to depend on ISPs to access email.

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When Internet standards began to crystallize, POP (or Post Office Protocol) servers emerged as a standard

Bhatia and Jack Smith who were colleagues at Apple Computers extended a project called Javasoft, a way of using the Web to create a personalized database to store photos, to-do lists and schedules. Smith came up with a serendipitous idea to add email to this application. Both were struck by the sheer simplicity of the idea that could revolutionize the Net.

In fact, Bhatia was so excited about the idea that he was paranoid about someone stealing the idea and guarded it closely. They called the e-mail programHotmail, since it included the letters HTML-the mark-up language used to write the web pages.

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The rest is history. Bhatia took the business idea to Microsoft, which ended up shelling out a whopping $400 million to buy Hotmail.

After that a lot of other e-mail providers like Yahoo, Lycos and many others followed suit with free email service. What Hotmail did was enable a free service with a friendly interface that led to simple, cheap and a revolutionary new way of communication that would put paid to the charm of the humble letter which was denigrated to the lowly status of “snail mail.” Hotmail went from having zero users in 1995 to a staggering 260 million subscribers at present.

The advent of G(b)mail

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When Google got into the email game two years ago, the stakes in the market changed. The company offered users a whopping 1 GB worth of space compared to the piddling 10-25 MB offered by others in the market. With Hotmail, Yahoo and others, users had to pay for bigger storage space. Besides the free space, Gmail users were also floored by the elegantly simple interface.

Released on April 1st 2004, it built the initial hype by sending Gmail invites to a select few. This buzz rendered exclusivity to proud owners of Gmail accounts. Gmail soon reached a wide range of users and after more than two and a half years, Gmail is still in its beta phase.

Access to the service is available to those who get invites from existing account holders, from Blogger.com, or through their mobile phone. The company claims that this system has reduced the amount of abuse and spam. Today Gmail offers 2.8 GB space.

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In the face of the Gmail onslaught, Yahoo, MSN Hotmail and others upped their free email storage space last year. Today all major email providers offer a minimum of 1 GB of storage space.

Gmail is also pushing the limits of web innovation by adding interactive features like the integration of Google Talk within the mail and a conversation view of mails.

US-based Internet company, ClearContext’s survey of popular web mail service providers in 2005, revealed Gmail as the most popular webmail followed by Hotmail and Yahoo.

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Back home in India, Yahoo rules the roost as the most preferred portal for e-mail, according to JuxtConsult survey in 2005. Yahoo enjoys 38 per cent share with Rediff and Hotmail following with 21 per cent and 18 per cent respectively. Gmail is yet to catch up and has a 5 per cent user base.

Today MSN Hotmail may be lagging behind Gmail in the technology and user popularity stakes, but there’s no denying its role in revolutionizing Internet communication as we know it today.

© CyberMedia News