Jericho: There ain't no such thing as free email.

Round about 1997, I got myself a free email account from an internet company called Hotmail. It was the only form of communication I had with my roommates, who, at the time, were also my ride home from work. I was training for a new job at Boeing, there was only one phone for us to use and it was busy every break. I didn't have any money, and this was before cell phones were as common as they are now. Plus, we hadn't gotten email accounts at work yet. At the time, I would have gotten internal email only on the mainframe system. There were only a small percentage of the company working with this new product called "Exchange."

I liked Hotmail. I could keep up with Max, I got a news feed from Wired magazine, and it gave me something to do for the first month at the job when I had nothing to do. Not bad for free. They added some features, I had a calendar and some other stuff. Even better and still free.

Then, an announcement came up on Wired. Microsoft was buying Hotmail. They were putting together an ISP service called MSN and Hotmail was going to be one of the cornerstones. This bothered me and then again it didn't. I liked Hotmail as a service and I wanted to keep it around for a while, the instability of internet companies, even before the bubble burst, was legendary. Microsoft buying Hotmail meant that it had a better shot of being around for a while.

However - did it have to be Microsoft? I'm a long time Mac guy, but I have never been particularly anti-Microsoft. I use Office just like the rest of you, I actually like Office, and Exchange and Outlook and a lot of other Microsoft products. But, Hotmail was a free service. These are two words that Microsoft does not deal well with. "Free" might as well be a word from a dead language as far as they are concerned. There is money to be made everywhere, and if Microsoft can't make money from something, well, it's not from lack of trying, believe me. "Service" involves a level of humanity that Microsoft just doesn't possess. Microsoft makes some great products, but they have usually sucked at the whole service thing. If they were better at customer service, they would be in less trouble and have fewer people hate them, I would bet. You can't make money from good service - so Microsoft will have no part of it.

I knew that Hotmail would change drastically when MS bought it. I was correct. They immediately began to eliminate services. (There's one of those words!) They cut the news feed, they killed the ability to retrieve POP mail from other services. These were both some of my favorite reasons for having Hotmail. As the spammers began to ramp up, my Hotmail box was simply flooded with garbage - why? Hotmail was the easiest target on the internet. Even with Microsoft's "anti-spam" efforts, my 2MB of space was frequently lost in a pile of drek. Then, every other week there were security holes that MS was plugging up. Then, MS killed Hotmail Calendar. All of the features I had once enjoyed for free were now only available through the MSN pay service. There was no way I was going to pay for something I once got for free, especially considering all the problems that MS was having. No thanks.

I kept my Hotmail box, it's the only steady email box I have had for the last seven years. My "home" email address has changed a half dozen times, there have been about that many jobs, each with a different email address. However, I was always reachable at Hotmail. It's the only reason I have kept the box. It's the one place all my friends know they can catch me.

Now, in that time I have also had a variety of other "free" email addresses. One of the first was my address out at Yahoo! I liked the Yahoo! search engine early on and they have just gotten better and better as they became a "portal". As MS took features away and made them "for fee", Yahoo! kept adding new stuff. My Yahoo! account had 4MB of space to start with, then they added another 2 for we loyal users. Yahoo! kept their calendar, added Egroups, Briefcase, and on and on.

However, for whatever reason, I just never used my Yahoo! account all that much. Even with all the features, I reached for Hotmail long before Yahoo! to send a quick email. Something to do with habit, I had done a better job of keeping my Hotmail address book up to date, etc. It's silly now that I think about it.

In recent months, the "free email" services have been raising the stakes. Google, that kick-butt search engine, has delved into the free email service field. Google is looking to become a portal in it's own right and directly compete with the likes of Yahoo! We Blogger users have a chance to check out the new email service, since Blogger is owned by Google. Gmail, right from the get-go caused a stir by offering a gigabyte, yes, 1000MB of space. No other service is even close to that, pay or otherwise. They also have a unique method for organizing email. I've had fun playing around with it. But, I'm not sure it will become my "daily driver".

To answer this, Yahoo! has comeback with offering 100MB to all of their members, new or old. They are also freeing up a bunch of accounts that haven't been touched for years. With all the features, with all the extra space and the fact that Yahoo! has never steered me wrong, I think Yahoo! email will become my first choice for daily email.

And, as for Hotmail? Well, I'll keep the crap cleared out of the box. People will still be able to find me there. But, beyond that, to hell with Microsoft! When they bring out a new version of IE for the Mac, maybe I'll cut them a little slack!