The email capacity battlefield

While people struggle to keep their email archive below imposed storage limits at work a battle is raging in the market for free web email products. The latest development is Yahoo's announcement that their free webmail service will offer unlimited storage in near future.

Google's Gmail started the capacity race in 2004 by offering gigabytes of email storage. The following year, Google started increasing the storage limit on a daily basis to give the illusion of unlimited storage. But the fact is that if your percentage utilisation is increasing (i.e. if your email is growing faster than the allowance) you will run out of space at some point.

The three main webmail providers will soon be offering unlimited email storage which will then cease to be a competitive factor. The focus will change to attachment limits fair use policies and other features such as being able to use your email client of choice.

Despite the rise of collaborative spaces and secure extranets for document interchange, email is still the way business is done today. One company reports that some of their employees receive around a gigabyte of email per month, not counting spam. At many companies, imposed mailbox limits are in direct conflict with people doing their jobs and it is one of the reasons the relationship between IT departments and fee earners sometimes turns adversarial.

An industry has sprung up to offer solutions for sharing of large files with services such as DropSend operating with a 1 Gb attachment limit. But sometimes the fastest way to move data is by sailboat.

Tags: email Google Yahoo Yahoo Mail Gmail email storage mailbox limit DropSend attachment storage