Hotmail heats up storage race

In the latest round of “competition is good for everyone,” the Microsoft Network has joined the storage race.

Other free email services have been getting ready to compete in this changed email market. For instance, with the threat of Gmail going public (right now you can only get an account by invitation, although those invitations aren’t exactly scare, I’ve been turning them down left and right), Yahoo increased their free e-mail storage up to 100MB, and offered 2GB for paying customers. Now comes the news that Hotmail will be offering paying users the same 2GB of storage, but giving free users 250MB. As eWeek magazine points out the storage race is just beginning.

If case you’re out of the loop: Gmail is the pre-release beta of Google’s mail service, and it has been offering it’s customers a full gigabyte of storage in exchange for their permision to scan their emails and target advertising based on what it learns. The idea is that users will keep all their email on the Google server (since they won’t run out of room), thus allowing Google unprescedented access to information about them, which means that Google can target it’s advertising very carefully, and achieve better response rates, which will allow them to charge advertisers more for placement, offsetting the cost of the increase in storage.

With all this storage, all I can think is that someone’s going to come up with a way to use their email accounts for file sharing by automatically emailing you files upon request …

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