Free Gigabyte Email From Gmail

IF YOU'VE BEEN WONDERING why your Hotmail box recently increased in size from 2 Megabytes to 250 Megabytes, it may have something to do with competition from a popular search engine. Gmail is Google's almost-ready e-mail service. The company will be taking on Hotmail and Yahoo in the webmail arena. With rumors flying around about Yahoo and Microsoft beefing up their search services, Google is sticking a thumb in their collective eyes with this new service. One of its key features is a full gigabyte of disk space for your mail.

Google's new Web-based e-mail service, has sparked commentary, controversy and even calls for congressional action mostly due to its free software-as-service technology.

Before we go any further, we want to stress that Gmail is still cooking in Google's oven. It's not a finished product, so what you ultimately see when it is released may differ significantly in some ways from the product we're discussing here.

If you constantly hop back and forth between Linux and Windows boxes, Gmail is a godsend. You won't have to mess around with local pop3 e-mail clients. You can just open our browser in Linux or Windows and get immediate access to all of your e-mail. And, unlike Yahoo or Hotmail, your simply won't have to worry about running out of space.

It started as an experiment to see if our search could be used on e-mail. And in fact, it was originally applied to my e-mail. I get a lot of e-mail—I have many gigabytes of it, and it's hard to manage. I have all the same challenges as everybody out there, and I found that having effective search, having large storage, having the kind of threading that we've done here—all those things make me more efficient with my e-mail. And that's what I then decided that we should make available to the entire world. Google co-founder Sergey Brin

From DC: Obviously, there are privacy implications of Gmail, but I'm interested in the opportunities for programmability of this technology. If we could establish an API for this, that would be something really spectacular!