E-mail online: Is size all that matters?

My friend Sree posted a question to our linkedin network the other day about a story he’s researching on free e-mail sites. Yahoo has recently upped the storage on their free e-mail accounts to unlimited space. Google has been offering 2GB of storage to gmail users for a while now. Seems like the battle of Web 2.0 service giants over free e-mail is all about size, but what does it mean for online businesses and users like us? It seemed like good blog fodder, so I grabbed my answer after posting it to share here.

E-mail is the stickiest Internet service, plain and simple. Even if it is just browsing and deleting spam, reading and writing e-mail via a free webmail site adds up to a lot of page views, repeat visits, and long user sessions. Personally, I believe it generally takes more time to compose our thoughts than it does for us to read others' thoughts. This is a magic component in social networking sites, blogger sites, bulletin boards and forums, and other such Web 2.0 services that offer contribution hooks.

Of course the big Web 2.0 services will war over e-mail. Along with bitnet chat and other mainframe apps, e-mail predates the earliest period of the Internet's existence; it is one of the primordial online species that was among the first to evolve, rapidly reaching a high level of functionality so that it did not essentially have to change. There are refinements that have adapted to the environment, such as handling larger attachments and displaying rich text or html formatting, but in essence, gmail is the same SMTP animal that Pine was decades ago.

Back in the day, many online publishers toyed with ideas of offering mysite.com emails to users if only for marketing and building brand awareness. Server space was more expensive then, but in the Web 1.0 economy, we didn't really recognize or sell the concept that people would spend so much reading and writing web mail that there would be an advertising market behind services. Content was king, but we’ve begun to realize the power of services now. Earlier this year, Yahoo’s overall page view drop when they shifted to the AJAX beta for mail was an eye-opener on many levels, and I would not be surprised if it led to a whole shift in how they view the service as part of the business.

You can view the big service sites offering unlimited storage as a loss leader to get users in their network and keep them there. Others who responded to the free e-mail question mentioned Google’s suite of sweet apps, including docs and spreadsheets, analytics, and advertising tools. In addition to being a giant aggregator of content and directory information, Yahoo offers a slew of individual and community services such as 360, groups, flickr, etc, that can be blended and anchored around e-mail. Google’s apps are very entrepreneurial, Yahoo's services are very casual and community friendly. Niche behavior may fall in line accordingly, and any startups or second-tier players in the field may have to rely an alternative branding affinity to create cliques (and subsequently clicks) in their communities.

There are few constants to limit our online behaviors, but we cannot escape that there is only so much time. A great majority of our time spent with connected devices is spent with e-mail, and despite our increasing tendencies to multitask; we still are bound by single consciousness. If a user is going to devote X percentage of their time to e-mail at the sacrifice of browsing other sites or using other services, it makes perfect sense to try to own as big a share of X as possible.

There are great cultural angles to this topic as well as technology and service and economy. It makes me think about how multiple owners utilize their freemail-associated identities differently as well. I use my Google apps and identity for my personal businesses and related blogging; I use my Yahoo apps and identity for my neighborhood activities, social and family life; I use my university e-mail for academic functions and interaction; I create a hotmail account when I want quick and disposable anonymity; I use full-blown, professional desktop apps and real services like Exchange and Blackberry for my "real" job. The mix works well for me, and I know many other hard-onliners who behave similarly.

There’s a lot more to free e-mail than inbox size. Where do you fall, how do you use it, and what draws you where? Would it make sense if your favorite news site also offered you an online e-mail service? Or your public television station? Perhaps the ability to private message within social networking sites like myspace is more practical model for publishers. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) offer e-mail with your connection and hosting providers do the same. E-mail is everywhere, but we choose to use different addresses and different services for different reasons. Maybe when it comes to e-mail, what matters most is how you use it.