NO POSTAGE DUE

摘要

In the same way it rocked the Internet-search world, Google has caused a stir in the Webmail arena, this time with its recent introduction of Gmail (in beta at press time). At the time of the announcement, leading services such as Yahoo Mail and MSN Hotmail were offering free e-mail accounts with a mere handful of megabytes of storage, while Gmail boasted a whopping 1GB of storage for free. Not surprisingly, Yahoo and Microsoft responded with larger storage maxi- mums for their free, services, but not every major Webmail service had responded to the Gmail threat as we were preparing this article. We looked at five of the largest Webmail services to find out which delivered the most features for, well, nothing—including such niceties as virus scanning of messages and spam filtering.