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These three mail services are in close competition, constantly improving their systems to entice potential users to register. They are all similar in some ways, but what sets them apart? What makes them different? Soon enough they will all offer almost identical features, with Yahoo Mail Beta and Windows Live Mail improving on their predecessors (Yahoo Mail and Hotmail) and finally catching up to the currently superior Gmail service. When that time comes you should be prepared to make an informed decision, so read on.

All three services offer some kind of virus scanning utility, junk mail filter, rich text editor, integration with email clients such as Outlook (Yahoo requires you to have a paid subscription to gain access this feature) and integration with an IM service. Ironically, the service which is falling behind in IM integration (Google's GoogleTalk is not yet as established as Windows Live Messenger or Yahoo Instant Messenger) is the first and only service to include a completely browser-based, fully functional instant messaging system in its interface design.

Allowed storage space on Hotmail and Yahoo is 1GB, and 2GB on a Plus account. It is possible to upgrade your Hotmail account to Windows Live Mail and receive a further gigabyte of space (2GB for a free account). Gmail's storage is currently 2.8GB and it is increasing by 4 Bytes per second. The rate of increase has decreased since the advent of Google's "ever growing storage" approach in 2005, and is prone to fluctuation. 10MB is the standard size limit for attachments, but Gmail limits bandwidth instead of attachment size.

Yahoo Mail and Hotmail's interfaces run on HTML, Google's runs on Ajax, which is superior. The next generation of Yahoo Mail, and also Windows Live Mail have followed suit and switched to Ajax. Use of Ajax framework in the programming of the interfaces means that functionality similar to that seen in regular applications can now be included in web pages. It is possible to access Gmail in 40 languages, Windows Live Mail in 21 languages, and Yahoo in 17 languages.

Gmail uses a unique "conversation" system which groups back and forth email conversations into a single entity. Quite a noticeable difference to other services is the lack of folders for organization of emails in Gmail, which it makes up for through "labels." Here is an explanation of labels taken from Gmail's help section:

"Labels do all the work of folders and give you an extra bonus: you can add more than one to a conversation.

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