Will Google's Gmail spell trouble for Email Marketing.

By Ed Bellamy
Posted Thursday, January 27, 2005

We wait with baited breath for the anticipated launch of Google's Gmail - a fre*e email account, capable of storing 50,000 short, text only messages. That was not a misprint. Your inbox would be a full gigabyte (1000mb's) of emails.

Hot on the heels are Google's rivals: Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) and Hotmail (www.hotmail.com)

Yahoo has increased the size of its fre*e email support to 100mb's. Or, for $19.99 a year, your inbox can be 2 GB's, twice the size of Gmail.

Hotmail has increased its fre*e email to 250mb's. And you'll soon be able to have 2 GB's from them for $19.95 a year.

Now, on the one hand that's great news for web-email users. Loads of space for cramming trillions of little emails or a good number of emails with massive attachments. Also, web-email users won't have to check their inboxes every five minutes, and it will reduce the bounces, too.

Right, that's good news then! But on the other hand, and this is merely my opinion of course; if most of the other web-mail suppliers follow suit, to capture or hold onto their corner of the market, there will be a gazillion more megabytes of inbox space for the spa*mm*ers. There will be thousands of emails waiting to be read, with filters filtering the filtered.

Mixed-in with all those emails consisting of: private, friendly and spa*mm*ers, will be the genuine marketer, entrepreneur, small and large businesses, all vying for attention.

With all those emails waiting to be read, the likely outcome is... they won't be. Our emails will be deleted along with the
rest. That will of course do wonders for our business.

One question that needs to be answered is: how are service suppliers, ISP's etc, going to increase the anticipated bandwidth that this upgrade will create. Especially when they already claim their wires are bulging to the limits, now?

My crystal ball tells me; increase the cost of bandwidth, charge legitimate businesses to send emails. Result - demand will drop and everyone's a winner. Uh! That is, except you and me.

Twelve months ago somebody told me it wouldn't be long in his opinion before email marketers were a dying breed, unless radical new technology was introduced. I laughed - I'm not laughing now!

About the Author
Ed Bellamy. No riddle or diddle, no wiffle or waffle, no dis or dat. Just plain old every day english. Visit his web site or send a blank email to - mailto:dotbasic@freeautobot.com (http://www.dotbasicworld.com) Copyright(c)2004.