Free Web-based e-mail services can be slow, clunky, sometimes unreliable and often glutted with messages from persistent Nigerian government ministers urgently seeking your aid.
But you get what you pay for, and for all their imperfections, free services have become hugely popular for the obvious reason that they cost nothing. That main reason for sticking with the free mailers is quickly vanishing, though, as Yahoo and Hotmail, the two largest free e-mail services, have started to not-so-gently nudge users to pay for "premium" features.
And this is just the beginning. Though neither service would give a hint of further future fees, some experts say that sooner or later we'll see a day when only the most rudimentary of e-mail features will cost nothing, and every fancy extra will require a fancy buck or two.
"There will always be low-end services with no support offered for nothing," predicted David Ferris of Ferris Research, "and then there will be all sorts of services consumers sign up for, from $5, $10 or even $15 a month."
In addition to charging for more online space and the privilege of accessing mail from desktop programs, which Yahoo and Hotmail are now doing, the services could start charging for speedier and more reliable service, for better anti-spam systems and for more technical support, Ferris said.
On Wednesday, Yahoo said that it was testing a new plan to charge users $2 a minute for phone support.
And Terra Lycos, which is Wired News' corporate parent, said that it would soon unveil a new premium e-mail service with more storage space, support for desktop mail programs, and no advertising. A representative declined to say what the service would cost, but he said that he saw no reason why Lycos e-mail users wouldn't like it, because the company isn't taking anything away from its free service.
But Ferris said that longtime free-mail users aren't likely to be happy about all the e-mail changes, and "some will feel outraged, and some will feel like they're being taken advantage of." But since the services are moving in lockstep with each other, many people will feel that they have no choice but to pay for better features.
But in a new world where folks are resigned to paying for e-mail, a few companies – some new and some old – are betting that they'll have new leverage to compete against the behemoths.
If people have decided to pay for mail, they might say that they want a service of more apparent quality than that offered by Yahoo or Hotmail, according to Ethan Diamond and Iain Lamb, two programmers who say that they've created just such a luxury service.
Diamond and Lamb call their service Oddpost. It's a Web-based e-mail application that works as quickly and as easily as a desktop e-mail app, with an interface that "people would much rather sit in front of for hours than Yahoo or Hotmail," Diamond said.
For more than a year, Diamond and Lamb carted their laptops and wireless modems to some of San Francisco's finest coffee houses, coding what they bloviatingly call "indubitably the most astounding Web-based e-mail application on earth."
Late last week, the programmers unveiled their work – and the initial evidence is that people love Oddpost. The company spent no money on marketing and received no media coverage, but like the best technology often does these days, the site found its way onto various weblogs and discussion sites, and "we got slammed with traffic," Diamond said. (Indeed, the response was so unexpectedly overwhelming that the site has sometimes been unable to cope; the company is working to fix that problem, Diamond said.)
Within a few days of its release, more than 300 people have signed up for the service, which costs $30 for a year after an initial free month. For that $30, users get 30 MB of e-mail storage online, the ability to access mail from other e-mail accounts, no advertising and the program's stunning interface.
It's hard to say, indubitably, that Oddpost is the best Web-mail app on the planet – there's no accounting for taste, after all – but the program is rather good. Instead of the lumbering setup standard in Web e-mail, where each action takes a few seconds to complete, Oddpost gives you a quick, drag-and-drop design that looks and feels like a "real" e-mail program.
It does this using DHTML – a kind of advanced version of the HTML that codes Web pages. DHTML code is not, by nature, cross-platform, so Oddpost only works on newer versions of Internet Explorer for Windows. If it becomes financially feasible to do so, Diamond said the company could consider building versions for other platforms; they have had several requests to do so already.
What's compelling about Oddpost is that Diamond and Lamb seem to have introduced it at just the right time. "We didn't expect when we launched it on Thursday for there to be as much interest from individuals as there was," Diamond said, explaining that the company's goal was to demonstrate the app on the site in an effort to convince larger businesses to license the product for their own e-mail systems.
But many people signing up for the system said that one of the reasons they think it's OK to pay for e-mail is that they figure the free services will be nickel-and-diming them anyway.
"We were lucky to come out at a moment here when a lot of people are reevaluating their e-mail choices," Diamond said.
Steve Bowbrick, CEO of Another.com, echoed these sentiments in a recent interview. The U.K. firm used to offer free e-mail addresses at more than 15,000 domain names – pretty much anything from johnnydoe@a-bit-thick.com to johnnydoe@zonked.co.uk – but earlier this year it decided it couldn't survive any longer without charging a fee.
"The advertising revenue has evaporated. It's gone," Bowbrick said. The company told its 1.8 million users that they'd have to pay 15 pounds a year for 20 Another.com e-mail addresses, and within two days, Bowbrick said, hundreds had signed up. Asked for an update on the subscription plan several weeks later, Bowbrick wrote in an e-mail: "I'm happy to confirm that it's still going well, and we're on course for a comfortably break-even year. We may yet become poster-boy for subscriber-funded dot-coms!"
Like the guys at Oddpost, Bowbrick said that the appeal of his service was that it offered people a chance to get added value for their money – in the case of Another.com, he said, that value is users' ability to differentiate themselves from "generic" Yahoo and Hotmail addresses.
Yahoo and Hotmail, too, insist that they're offering added value for the fees they charge. And although neither firm divulged the number of subscribers to their pay services, each said that it was very pleased with the response.
Ferris, the communications analyst, said that while smaller services may find that this could be a ripe time to steal people away from the big guys, "let's be explicit about the analogy – this won't be as bad as people changing their long distance services."
That's because to many users, e-mail addresses offer the solace of firm identity in an otherwise anonymous medium, and people who've had their addresses for awhile will be deliberative in deciding to switch it to something new.
Then there's always the possibility that the little guy will disappear in the abyss of other failed dot-coms.
It's worth noting that together Hotmail and Yahoo have hundreds of millions of users – with that sort of base, they have power and incentive enough to compete against upstarts who may lay claim to their customers.
