One fine day when I checked my Rediffmail free email account, I just couldn't believe my eyes 00...Sitting right there above the login form fields was a small message displaying 1GB INBOX space for Rediffmail email accounts!!! Rediffmail also has a paid version for their email service, which I guess has had a reasonable amount of success, so I thought that this 1GB is a good idea to gather more paid members. However, to my utter surprise when I entered by INBOX and on a hunch checked the "Storage Space" I found that this 1GB space is for the free accounts. I almost fell off my chair!!! <craaaash>
Rediff and Rediffmail
For those who don't know about Rediffmail, it has been one of the premier web email providers in India. Their portal (www.rediff.com) is also very popular - at least I use its cricket section whenever I need to check scores. Rediff was one of the first to launch a portal of stature in India. Riding the Internet wave (to use a cliché), several other companies made their online presence. There was Indiainfo.com, which had advertised in all forms all over the country and is now forgotten by most of us! Indiatimes.com, a portal launched by the Times of India newspaper group has also been a success primarily because it has a very good offline medium to advertise - the Time of India newspaper... And there was Indya (www.indya.com). All these portals offered free email accounts.A few years back Rediffmail came up with a brilliant idea to segregate itself from the pack. It started to advertise its free email account service - their punch line was Lightning fast email and it indeed was! At that time, net users in India used popular email services like Hotmail, Yahoo!, Snap etc. and most of us accessed the Internet through dial-up connections that were very slow. Accessing the INBOX at Hotmail or Yahoo! was so frustrating as it used to take so much time. I guess Rediff would have done a consumer survey and received a feedback that people needed to access email over quick servers. With their lightning fast email servers Rediffmail gave what everyone in India wanted - fast access to online email.
The very idea of advertising a free email service and spending money to upgrade it was something that other portals had not thought about. Rediffmail's competition too advertised their services but the ads mentioned different services offered by the portal and did not put emphasis on one particular service.
The Lightning fast Rediffmail gained a loyal following.
This was followed by the email over mobile phone service from Rediffmail. Users could access the Rediffmail INBOX via their cell phones.
Nowadays, since, most net surfers in India use either cable or DSL accessing the Internet over fast connections is no longer a problem. So Rediffmail comes up with another beauty - offering free 1GB email account. Obviously, this step has been prompted by the release of Gmail, but the fact that an Indian company has taken this step is something that all Indians should be proud of!
Testing the Rediffmail 1GB
I sent four emails to my Rediffmail account with fairly large attachments. Using DSL, I was able to download these emails back to my computer in seconds - 12.9MB, 1.1MB, 4.4MB and 7.4Mbtook 119, 10, 32 and 72 seconds respectively. So Rediffmail is not only lightning fast it also provides a huge storage space.You can read about the new Rediffmail features here - http://mail.rediff.com/learnmore.htm.
You can check up the other 1GB free email service providers here.
Manish Sharma - 21st July 2004.
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