Over the years, Internet based e-mail has evolved; beginning from a philosophy of read and delete to store and ignore. Services all over the net are now aiming to provide more storage space by the gigs and up the ante on user-friendliness and speed. So what’s best thing about all this hubba? It’s all free.

The Karl Marx of all this fiasco is a little kid named Google, catalyzing the e-mail storage revolution when it first announced G-Mail in early 2004. This fanatical step from search engine to web mail provider would give users 1 Gigabyte in total storage space and was seemingly urged to be free of charge. Luckily, Google closed G-Mail from the public and made the registrations by invitation (existing users of G-Mail inviting new people to join) and made the whole scheme seem plausible. But by years end, the net was swarming with these invites; anyone who wanted it had it. Even more unbelievable, early this year Google has increased the storage limit to 2 Gigabytes and growing. The interface for G-Mail isn't dazzling, but it is simple and easy to get to the point. Ads are not image based and are few in number, not to mention they only display ads relevant to what you are reading. Features like an advanced filtering system, virus scanner, POP3 support, and advanced search makes G-Mail a joy to use.

Not a new web mail contender, Yahoo has been providing the service for over 5 years now. Their storage quota at 200 Megabytes was impressive, but here stands Google; offering 1 Gigabyte of storage space at their first sortie. Immediately, all Yahoo standard accounts were upgraded to 1 Gigabytes to counter the attack. Google’s next move? Add another Gigabyte and continue its space growth. The battle ended there, Google: 2 Gigs, Yahoo: 1. Yahoo's webmail service is old, but that certainly doesn't make it the best. The entire work area is cluttered with ads and whatnot; though it is feature rich, not alot of them are easy to navigate to. Yahoo webmail is a safe route, but there are better.

A fresh entry into the foray stands AOL… woohoo! This month (July), AOL Mail has started offering free 2 Gigabyte accounts to it users, again, free of charge. I don’t know what the point is, who uses AOL that doesn’t have an e-mail account with storage space sacrificed for full, juicy inboxes of SPAM? The up-side to all this is a beautiful and clean interface; and a well-designed navigation menu. There are image ads, but not as much as Yahoo. This new service by AOL is obviously a winner as well, providing features like SPAM blocker, virus scanner, and compatibility with AIM.

With all this heat, it forces everyone to do better right? Hopefully so, but we will see soon enough. In the future, expect web mail providers to have software so complex and feature rich that they replace Outlook or Lotus; and possibly storage space so unimaginable that it won’t be a feature anymore; it’ll simply say that you can save your mail here.