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By Wolfgang Gruener, Senior Editor
September 27, 2004 - 19:48 EST
Chicago (IL) - And you thought Google's 1-GByte Gmail was big: Hellacious Riders, an online motorcycle magazine, announced that it launched a 100-GByte Email service to its users. The firm extended its offer with a challenge to THG readers for a 1000 GByte account.
Not everything is just about size. But when it comes to email, size was the single one topic which caused frenzy among providers as soon as Google had announced its one GByte Gmail service. A perfect tool to keep users on its site and to increase advertising exposure, the search engine forced other portals such as Yahoo and Lycos to step up their inbox sizes.
Google claims in its promotion of Gmail that users never will have to delete emails again, due to the pure dimension of its service. Hriders.com, based in Irvine, California, believes that one Gigabyte simply is not enough and offers what Google presented as a bug to some users in the week after Gmail's launch: A whopping 100 GByte.
Hellacious Riders' primary business is an online motorcycle magazine which publishes articles about motorcycles, lists classifieds, and provides access to a topic-specific search engine. In order to attract interest, the company launched a 3-Gigabyte free email service a little over a month ago and since then has signed up more than 36 million users, according to Jim Weiss, President of the iTrade Group which publishes Hellacious Riders.
In a rational view, the motorcycle site has little to do with email. Weiss however said that he noticed the attention Gmail received and felt this was a great way to promote his site. "Gmail was incredibly hyped and it is not even out today, " he said. "So we decided to offer a 3 GByte email account to users. But it is easy for others to increase that to 5 GByte. We wanted to do something 'hellacious' and came up with the idea to offer 100 GByte and allow users to send attachments in sizes up to 500 MByte."
100 GByte would translate into approximately four million emails or 200,000 high-resolution digital images.
Up to today, Weiss has signed up 52 million users in countries - a number which he wants to grow significantly to be recognized as record: "We would like to be included in the Guinness Book of Records for the world's largest mailing list," he said.
iTrade pays for the service through advertising revenues, generated by ads displayed in a banner on the websites and in a newsletter the company sends out once a month. Weiss stated that he will offer firms to advertise in his newsletter which currently is sent to 40.5 million users who have agreed to receive the information. Users would not see pop-up on the service, he said. Email can be viewed either on the website or through any popular email client which supports POP3.
While Hellacious Riders remains the core business of iTrade, Weiss said that the email service is growing quickly and may be spun off to another service. For the coming week he plans to launch a fee based email service with capacities ranging from one Gigabyte to one TByte. An ad-free 100 GByte email account will be priced at $150 per year.
In a challenge to demonstrate the size of the account, he said that he would challenge readers of Tom's Hardware Guide to fill up the complete account with data. "The first user who is able to use the complete space will receive from us a free email account with one TByte space on a dedicated server," Weiss said. "This will be the worlds largest email inbox."
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