A HIGH-intensity space war is on in cyberspace. But the most peaceable Netizens are loving it. The latest salvo has been fired by search engine giant Google that has doubled to 2GB the space available for users of its GMail webmail service. It had set off the space wars when it entered the free webmail business, offering a mammoth 1GB space a year back. It forced Yahoo! Mail to increase the 6MB space it was offering to 100MB, initially, and then to 250MB. Feeling the heat of the competition, Yahoo! Mail has now promised to increase the space to 1GB.
Even Microsoft, one of the last to acknowledge competition, is also rumoured to be planning to increase its 2MB space several times. These war cries must be music to the ears of the users. What else would they need if they could park a few years’ emails without ever bothering to clear up space? Anybody who has ever had the mortification of deciding which mails to delete and which to keep would understand the pleasure of having such huge cyber real estate like a mailbox a few GBs big. It is not space alone that the webmail players are serving up to entice more users.