Jelle Druyts

Yahoo! Mail has just upgraded its free email service so you can store up to 100MB in stead of the meager 6MB it was before. Furthermore, it also has an advanced search feature that lets you search messages in your mail folders by certain criteria.

So, that's a very obvious move toward Google's upcoming GMail service, which allows storage up to 1GB and also has this type of full-text searching. (Or so I'm told by the hype machine anyway, because it's in beta and on an invite-only basis for now.) So who said competition wasn't doing any good for customers?

So that's two search engines coupled with email services making a move. I'm predicting MSN Search and Hotmail will soon follow. And if they want to keep an edge, they'll have to surpass it somehow.

I have an idea how they might achieve that: why does everybody want POP or IMAP access to mailboxes? (It's still in beta but there's already a POP proxy for GMail [via Scoble's Linkblog]...) Because the browser experience just isn't good enough for demanding email users. (And for long-term archival, but that's something these new large email storage spaces are supposed to handle.)

So how about a smart client for Hotmail? Think about it, access your email everywhere in a rich GUI without having to explicitly install anything. It's a perfect sell for the smart client, .NET, Hotmail, MSN - Microsoft tout court. Should be easy, right?