This has some similarity to HotSnoJ's post but I thought a better subject name was required and I had just a lot more to say.
There probably hasn't been a better time to get an email account but what do you really get...
Googles' Gmail still in its Beta stage offered users 1000MB (Close to 1GB), though what remains to be seen is how they could possibly offer such a service. With the current Internet population there was no way they could offer every user 1GB and not have problems. Apparently Gmail servers went down several times during the Beta test and now Google will be
shutting down the Gmail Beta service in July. So as you can see theres no doubt Google will be discontinuing the research and testing for Gmail for the time being.
Yahoomail now has larger e-mail accounts for both new and existing members, for paid users its gone up-to 2GB (absurd in its entirety) and for free users its gone upto 100MB from 4 or 6MB. They have also upped the amount you can send to 10MB. Of course you get the extra added features of spam filters and address blocking. Yahoo has also reported that there servers have shutdown twice ever since they upgraded there e-mail services.
Microsoft's hotmail remains to be the same, whether they really care or they have a plan is yet to be announced. So as far as that goes nothing is changing on their front.
While these seem to be the major competitors in e-mail, well and your own ISP accounts, which I prefer any day. There are other places like the recent
Rediff which offers 1GB free storage with a 10MB send limit.
What I don't seem to understand is why they place such a small limit? on such a large account! What makes even less sense is why they're even considering to offer such large amounts of space? Come to think of it programs like Eudora email allow you to save e-mails to your own computer. A piece of advice for those who take advantage of this 'larger' e-mail storage, don't be surprised if they shove it back down to something more reasonable like 20MBs... losing e-mails isn't exactly a good thing especially when there important.
I spose what I'm trying to find out is if its really worth having a 1GB set aside for e-mail or even 100MB... its just e-mail isn't it!