As of today 18th October 2007 , my Gmail account storage is at 3577MB or around 3.5GB. At this rate, come 23rd October 2007, it will hit around 4321MB as stated by unofficial news source. 4.3GB of storage, that is about to catch up with Hotmail’s 5GB of storage.

But I am in the opinion that increasing storage is nothing new anymore. Since there is already an abundance of storage space. Not to mention those who open a few Gmail accounts. Like me. I have around 3 Gmail accounts, 3 Hotmail accounts and 2 Yahoo Mail accounts.

I would rather see more features rather than more storage space. And also improved spam filters. Gmail has the best as it catches the most spam/junk mails. Hotmail and Yahoo Mail still have a long way to go!

Gmail still has the best interface so far as compare to Yahoo Mail’s new interface and Live Hotmail.  I hope there will new features rather than this race about storage.

There is already a few suggestions of new features for Gmail @ Gmail suggestions..
A few of the suggestions are very promising like :

• Customize my Gmail color scheme

• Import messages from my other email accounts

Update : It’s now 3.7GB and climbing!

According to unofficial news source, Gmail will increase it’s storage on October 23 from 3.1GB to 4321 MB of storage (around 4.3GB). It will slowly grow until around 6G at the beginning of January 2008. According to the unofficial news source, after January 4th 2008, the storage counter will increase 3.3MB per day. And it would seems that Gmail’s paid storage option will also be given a boost in storage without changing the prices. Although this news is unconfirmed, Gmail already mentioned plans to increase the storage at the Official Gmail Blog, so we just have to wait and see if suddenly, our gmail account’s storage gets a boost.

This is good news indeed. It is also probably a counter-reaction to Hotmail’s 5GB free storage and Yahoo Mail’s (virtually) unlimited storage space.

I wonder what’s next? Since, now storage is not an issue anymore. It probably will go down to which email service provider is going to come up with more features and better service in this arms race for market share(??).  Adding more storage is not good enough when there is already an abundant of storage. I would like to see an increase in size for email attachments from 10MB to around 15MB or 20MB per email or more!

There is also a need for better spam filters.  Hotmail and Yahoo mail needs to improve on their spam filters, as my Hotmail and Yahoo Mail accounts will have spam mails in my Inbox. Which means, the spam filters are not working. However, even Gmail too fails to catch one or two of those pesky spam/junk email on rare occasions.

Gmail still is the best free email service there is. Hopefully, the Gmail team will improve some more after this whole storage arms race is being won and done with!

Update : The storage counter now is at 3.3GB, so, probably by October 23th, hitting 4.3GB is very likely.

Those who have a Gmail account knows that their email storage space is ever increasing day by day. However, according to a blog post from the Official Gmail Blog, Google plans to increase Gmail storage capacity by increasing the rate in which the storage counter will increase. Currently the counter is at around 2.9GB increasing little by little.

I guess this is because Hotmail increased their storage to 5GB of free space, while Yahoo Mail virtually gave limitless storage space.

I wonder how to use all those storage? So far, my Gmail account is only using up to 7% of 2.9GB.