Lycos announced last week that their new e-mail service, currently in beta testing, will offer 3GB of storage and allow the size of attachments sent and received to be unlimited - for free. An upgraded plan for 20 dollars would boost the storage capacity to 5 GB, but 3 GB should be sufficient for most regular internet and e-mail users. This paid email service is the first of its kind, with exception to Yahoo Mail, which was my former mail client, but with Gmail's new appearance, I stopped using the deprecated Yahoo mail, which offers only 2 GB of space, compared to the almost 3 GB offered by Gmail. But Lycos, going ahead with this email service, will top them all with 3-5 GB, and AOL is coming out with an e-mail service with 5 GB as well. Google will undoubtedly increase their space as well, but currently bandwidth and space constraints have limited it to only a few GB per user, well short of their goal of unlimited space for every user, a goal that is planned to be executed in their new GDrive service. Personally, I can't wait until this GDrive comes out, because it solves all the file hosting and e-mail storage problems I have encountered, but how soon this will be implemented is whole different story.

Can this new offering from Lycos take out other popular storage-focused e-mail services, such as Google's Gmail, or Yahoo! Mail (The closed beta version offers 2GB, and so does Live Mail, which is also in closed beta testing). Gmail, which currently offers 2.75GB of storage, has many features, including integrated Google Talk (with open federation VOIP and Jabber and XMPP compliance) and tabbed conversation view.

I use Gmail for now, and possibly forever, depending on what the competitors, such as Lycos, offer. Google has a high potential for storage and good features, and the integrated chat puts it way above its opponents. Gmail has a strong user base and its industry control will likely keep it on top of the e-mail market.