Free e-mail services...

Well I got me a gmail today thanks to José Rojas. How did I get it? Go to Gmail Swap and find out. But I'm here to talk about all the free stuff on the web.

What really is free in the world? I know of two things 1) Sindome and 2) Starwars MUSH. They are the only two things that are really free on the internet that I know of.

Why? It's simple, every free service on the internet isn't free. There is a cost to maintain a server and when there are costs there is money. Let's take e-mails for instance, there are web servers, data servers and personal to pay for. But you aren't paying for them, as neither am I. Or are we? Yes we are. Every time we access our free online e-mail we generate renevue for the ones that give us free stuff.

Renevue is directly connected to the number of times a web page is shown, but in this case it is advertising. If you thought banners, you're right. Every time you go to any website that has a service that is free there is at least one banner on it. And I must say that I love banners, simply for the fact that they just take a small portion of the page and do nothing until you click them. But I hate popups, popups are the devil spawn and should be forbidden of existence. They are simply the most annoying thing on the whole internet (apart from 13 years old boys who think they know everything).

But back to the topic, there is no such thing as free stuff on the internet. Someone is paying for it. Internet = cost. And whenever you see a banner you know that the page you're seeing right there was paid for the guy who ordered that banner. And by having that banner on the page, you increased that advertisement exposure by 1.

Multiply that one by the various pages an average user goes thru on a day and by the number of users that service has and you'll know that I'm talking about a lot of money. That pays your free service and even generates income for the company, lots of income... Trust me if there isn't profit they wouldn't do it.

Now back to free e-mails, Google's Gmail will offer 1Gb (one gigabyte!!!) of space for your e-mails and that's a lot! Yahoo has raised it's quota to 100Mb in response. So what's the deal? Is Google using all it's money from selling shares on the market to buy storage space?

Not really. The space you have in any e-mail account is virtual. That means that they don't reserve 1Gb or 100Mb for each account. They raise the account space as it is needed. Something like if you have 2mb of space used you'll have like 4mb freed for your account once it gets close to that they'll get you another 2mb and so on... That's how they can offer thousands of people 100Mb of free space. Most of the users stay on the 50% usage of a 4mb account just so they can receive larger e-mails when needed. But with 1Gb people will start to go nuts and pass on larger and larger e-mails. How Google will cope with that I do not know, but I'll be testing a big fat email soon. Maybe I'll send myself a DVD rip of some movie I have or something... 600mb on one e-mail. [Edit] It appears that the maximum size of any email you can send or receive from Gmail is 10Mb Still good enough [/Edit]

The catch of Gmail is directed advertising, they want you to keep your e-mails so they have a good base on what interests you have and other stuff. The procedure is totally automated and scans for keywords on your mails. It's neat stuff, revolutionary and will be a success. Imagine having banners that are pertinent to what you like without having some type of worm or cookie installed on your computer? The rate of clicks by ads shown will raise sky high.

Way to go Google.