Isn’t it funny how offering free gigabyte email accounts is suddenly newsworthy? After Google’s introduction of Gmail, at least two “competitors” have been very widely publicized. First Spymac matched Google’s disk space offer, and today Reuters of all places is telling us that an Israeli portal site is doing it, too.

What I’m wondering is why these companies were happy with just matching Google’s offer, rather than, say, upping the ante to 2GB? After all, the costs of email storage start to mount only after user adoption and a significant pile of received emails. And that probably means “never” for a site like Spymac.

Perhaps my blog should start offering ten-gigabyte email accounts. I just fear that besting Gmail by an order of magnitude would upset all the genius financial analysts out there and undermine the upcoming Google IPO.