Peter Griffin: Google's Gmail leaps to front in the space race

A couple of years back, I interviewed an amiable chap called Sabeer Bhatia - otherwise known in tech circles as "Mr Hotmail".

Bhatia had a fantastic story to tell. A story of how he arrived in the US from India on a scholarship with US$250 ($380) in his back pocket and within a few years had sold his start-up company to Bill Gates for about US$400 million.

Hotmail, you see, was Bhatia's baby. He'd developed it with his software developer mate Jack Smith to get around a problem with email - they didn't like the restrictive policies of their corporate email accounts.

Now isn't that a familiar gripe?

Hotmail was web-based so wasn't tied to any particular corporate email account or the policies associated with it.

Microsoft, which had failed to get a decent email platform off the ground, was taken with the concept and started giving away free Hotmail accounts. Bhatia became a very wealthy man and soon found himself judging Indian beauty pageants.

Hotmail.com wasn't the birth of email but it made it hugely popular. Within a few years, Microsoft had 150 million Hotmail users. In internet cafes and hotel rooms all over the world, travellers logged in to pick up their email, needing only an internet connection and a web browser to access their messages, which sat on a computer server in the US.

Internet users soon had a Hotmail address to go alongside their work email and that of their local internet provider.

But Hotmail, despite its revamps and upgrades to deal with the deluge of spam and viruses, has diminished in its usefulness for one major reason - lack of storage.

In these rich-media times, where broadband has made it easy and fast to send a 50-megabyte file, the 2MB storage limit on Hotmail accounts doesn't really cut it anymore. Even MSN Plus, the paid version of Hotmail, offers only 25MB storage.

Yahoo has a slightly more generous limit at 100MB. Thank God then for the next evolution in web-based email services - gmail.

The people behind the wildly popular search engine Google are beta-testing a smart email service that gives users a whole gigabyte of storage - 1000MB - for free. I managed to get myself an account and test-drive the new service and the overseas reviews are true, gmail is very impressive.

The design is very Google-ish - stripped down, uncomplicated by banner advertisements and bandwidth-chewing graphics. The interface has speed and ease of use in mind. Anyone used to Hotmail or Yahoo will be right at home.

The most heartening thing about gmail is the little usage meter at the bottom of the screen.

I'm currently storing 23MB of files. Gee, a whole 2 per cent of my allowance.

The average new computer hard drive these days holds 60 gigabytes. That's a lot of digital storage Google is going to have to make available. Ultimately not everyone will build up a collection of email messages reaching their 1GB limit, but many people will use the service to shuffle big files around.

In most respects, the service is superior to Hotmail and Yahoo. Apart from the huge storage allocation, gmail has access to the Google search engine from within the email browser.

It's a great feature that also allows you to search only the emails in your gmail account. As you approach a gigabyte of storage, this feature will be a Godsend.

As with Google search results, the first few lines of the emails can be displayed as they arrive. Emails can also be labelled - I've opted for "work stuff" and "private mail".

There is a spell check and no restriction on sending attachments. Messages of up to 10MB can be sent - Hotmail restricts this to 1MB while Yahoo allows 3MB.

Gmail has a spam filter which appears to be quite efficient (I can't tell for sure because my address is so new I'm unlikely to be in the spammers' sights just yet). The anti-spam feature lets you report spam emails to make it more intelligent.

A gmail account can be left inactive for up to nine months before you are evicted. The period is four months for Yahoo and 30 days for Hotmail.

Keyboard shortcuts can be set up to send emails more quickly.

There are a few flaws. It doesn't appear to be possible to save draft emails. There's no virus scanner - that may come with the final version.

Privacy advocates have balked at Google's plans to send adverts with incoming emails, based on the text of the email.

Frankly I don't have a problem with that. The adverts are discreetly listed down the right side of the email and I know computers are already scanning the text of my emails to check for spam. As Google goes public with a stock exchange listing in the US I'm willing to bank on them keeping my email details private.

The service doesn't seem to allow easy export of Hotmail contacts book, or sadly in my case, that of Lotus Notes. It does however import Outlook and Yahoo accounts.

Like its rivals, gmail has no provision for pop mail access, it's purely a web browser based service.

But none of that is too much of a let down and gmail is perfect for me to begin doing what Bhatia did with Hotmail - sidestep my corporate email restrictions.

Most months my email account is 200 to 300 per cent the 50MB allowance I've been granted. Unless I get the size of my account down in 30 days my ability to send email is removed - and it's happened.

I'm sure other large New Zealand corporates are just as tight-fisted with the storage space.

So here's what I'm going to do. I'll divert all of the email coming into my Herald account to my gmail account and sort through it there. With the 1GB storage limit I'll never run into the problems I do using my work account. With the gmail browser sitting in the background for incoming mail I'll then be able to send replies through the Herald's Lotus Notes programme as I always have. In that way, people still receive mail from my work address.

Yep, gmail is going to be huge. Hotmail, Yahoo and its contemporaries will have to follow gmail in freeing up storage if they are to remain popular.

Thanks to fellow local gmail triallist Juciteli, for getting me on the gmail guest list.
* Email Peter Griffin

* An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Yahoo had an email storage limit of 4MB. Yahoo recently increased this limit to 100MB.