Information Technology News
- NetEase upgrades free e-mail
Date: 12-Sep-2007 Sources: (Xinhua Online)
BEIJING, Sept. 11 -- Chinese portal NetEase.com launched free e-mail with unlimited storage space yesterday amid intensified competition from rivals.
The service was launched two days after China Yahoo!, operated by China's largest e-commerce company Alibaba.com Corp, offered unlimited storage space for mail users.
'We would like to provide good e-mail services for Chinese Web users,' said Ding Lei, chief executive officer of NetEase.
NetEase, China's largest e-mail service provider, has 220 million registered free e-mail accounts and dominates more than 50 percent of the market. No figures were provided yesterday for its paid e-mail accounts.
NetEase's existing users can upgrade to unlimited storage space by registering their mobile phone number for 'identity verification.'
Some loyal users can get short message alerts on their mobile for new e-mails, a function previously confined only to paid subscribers.
China Yahoo!, the country's second-biggest e-mail service provider, launched a similar service over the weekend, about six months after Yahoo Inc announced it would provide unlimited storage space worldwide to fend off competition from Microsoft's Hotmail and Google's Gmail.
Unlimited space offered by the country's top two e-mail services will narrow the room for other players to grow in the market, where storage space has become the most decisive selling point for free mail boxes, analysts said.
'The function and interface of all free mail boxes are becoming more and more similar while gigabyte space has become an entry level,' said Cao Fei of Analysys International, a Beijing-based IT consulting firm.
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