Google starts email war

The world's most popular internet search engine Google today declared war on Microsoft and Yahoo.

Google is launching a free email service which it believes will challenge the other leading free services.

Google's g-mail will have a storage capacity of up to eight billion bits - the equivalent of 500,000 pages for every user.

That is about 100 times larger than the storage capacity for either Microsoft's Hotmail or Yahoo's service.

Google also claims that g-mail will make unwanted spam emails a thing of the past.

The move comes at a time when other free email providers are considering charging for their services. This is in an effort to stop spamming which sees up to 400 million junk emails sent out around the world every day.

Spam now accounts for almost six out of every 10 messages and most advertise pornography, sex-enhancing drugs, gambling and bogus money-making scams.

More than 13 million people in the UK have free email accounts with Yahoo and 8.5 million are with Microsoft.

Google dominates the search engine market receiving more than 200 million inquiries a day, more than half of them from outside the USA. The new service will be based on Google's search technology and will allow users to quickly search through every email they have sent or received.

Google founder Larry Page said the idea for g-mail came from a Google user who moaned about spending all her time filing messages or trying to find them.

He said: "And when she's not doing that, she has to delete email like crazy."

G-mail was created by a Google engineer.

Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, said: "While developing g-mail was a bit more complicated than we anticipated we are pleased to offer to the user who asked for it."

The new systems will have one gigabyte or 1012 megabytes of storage space and Google also claimed it would turn spam email "into the equivalent of canned meat."

Google said it would start testing the service with a select band of users shortly.

It is expected to make money by matching advertisers to subjects people mention in their g-mail. The Californianbased search engine is about to go public on the US stock market in a move expected to value it at more than £9 billion and make multi-millionaires of its two founders.