Follow the timeline here. Last year, Google announced plans to launch a free web-based email system called GMail, where users would be able to store 1 GB of emails.

That dwarfed anything else offered for free by rivals like Yahoo and Hotmail, who were giving away about 1 per cent of that.

Then Hotmail increased its storage to 250 MB, and Yahoo plans to equal GMail by increasing their storage limit to 1 GB.

But GMail does not want to be outdone by anyone. Google announced that it will increase the storage space to a whopping 2 GB. Users might never have to delete a single email.

GMail is still in beta mode, and no official launch date has been announced. The system is expected to be launched this summer.

Despite the fact that getting a GMail address is not the easiest thing in the world (you need an invitation, which in fairness, isn’t the hardest thing to obtain), GMail is the fourth most used web-based email service, behind Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.

Coincidently perhaps, Google announced its plans for GMail exactly a year before announcing its improvements: April 1, 2004.

Besides the increased storage space, GMail has improved the way it appears, with more fonts and colours.






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