Chicago (IL) - Email inboxes are not just about sending, receiving and storing emails anymore. The California-based iTrade Group believes that email could become the single most important place to store every single piece of digital data. The increasingly popular email provider offers every Internet user a free email account with one Terabyte (TByte) of space.
Life is full of superlatives. We tend to connect terms such as the best and worst with values such as fastest and slowest. But sometimes there is the question, whether new record achievements still make sense. Such a question may come up with the size of email inboxes which not too long ago were capped at sizes of around ten MByte. Then Google's Gmail came along and started a frenzy among providers with the launch of a one GByte inbox.
Last September, the iTrade Group, based in Irvine, California, announced free 100 GByte accounts and recently increased the space to 1 TByte under its domain hriders.com. In our case, the account was even super-sized to 107,374,182.4 MByte, which translates to 102.4 TByte, since users who need more space would receive larger inboxes, according to the provider. But if its even "just one TByte", the email inbox is larger than most of us have available in harddrive space and has enough room to store more than 40 million emails, several hundred games, 200,000 MP3's, or more than 350,000 five Megapixel digital photographs.
Do we really need space for 40 million emails? That is the wrong question, believes Jim Weiss, CEO of the iTrade Group. In his opinion, email is the ideal way to store critical data such as pictures or any other important piece of information that could get lost through an accident - such as a fire. "We would like to provide people with an environment to store their data and don't have to be afraid to lose anything ever again," he said.
According to Weiss, the service already counts more than 100 million subscribers. "We have lots of people who store huge amounts of data. On average, every account is filled with data between five and ten MByte. 60 percent of our users use more than five GByte of their available space and 25 percent regularly send 500 MByte attachments all day long," he said. Upping his previous challenge, Weiss said that the company will give the first user who is able to fill up his inbox with legal content and without spam a dedicated server with a Petabyte (PByte) of space.
Weiss' motives are honorable, but there is no question that his business has to make money as every other firm does. According to him, the company which normally runs a biker's website with such services as classified ads "has the resources and the servers" to provide the service. The email service is funded by sponsors and advertising that is placed as banners on the page of the email inbox. Later on, users also agree to receive sponsored newsletters. However, Weiss said that he never would "flood" users with advertising or use pop-up ads since he "personally" does not like these forms of advertising.
If there is an service which sounds to be good to be true, common sense says that its probably true. But the fact about iTrade's service is that it is available and the only question about any such service may remain what really happens to the data which is stored on an outside server. The service has a privacy policy in place which states that "Hriders.com will never access, monitor, or remove project data unless required to respond to, react to, or investigate service issues, technical issues, our Terms of Service, or our Privacy Policy."
In our opinion, the iTrade's privacy today lacks the visibility and depth which would be needed to make us feel comfortable to store critical data on its servers. If its vision comes true, iTrade will sit on an enormous amount of private data - a situation that requires much more than the basic safeguarding policies described in the current privacy policy.
Nevertheless, a hriders.com email account provides without any doubt the largest amount of free external storage space. And there is always an argument for that.
Life is full of superlatives. We tend to connect terms such as the best and worst with values such as fastest and slowest. But sometimes there is the question, whether new record achievements still make sense. Such a question may come up with the size of email inboxes which not too long ago were capped at sizes of around ten MByte. Then Google's Gmail came along and started a frenzy among providers with the launch of a one GByte inbox.
Last September, the iTrade Group, based in Irvine, California, announced free 100 GByte accounts and recently increased the space to 1 TByte under its domain hriders.com. In our case, the account was even super-sized to 107,374,182.4 MByte, which translates to 102.4 TByte, since users who need more space would receive larger inboxes, according to the provider. But if its even "just one TByte", the email inbox is larger than most of us have available in harddrive space and has enough room to store more than 40 million emails, several hundred games, 200,000 MP3's, or more than 350,000 five Megapixel digital photographs.
Do we really need space for 40 million emails? That is the wrong question, believes Jim Weiss, CEO of the iTrade Group. In his opinion, email is the ideal way to store critical data such as pictures or any other important piece of information that could get lost through an accident - such as a fire. "We would like to provide people with an environment to store their data and don't have to be afraid to lose anything ever again," he said.
According to Weiss, the service already counts more than 100 million subscribers. "We have lots of people who store huge amounts of data. On average, every account is filled with data between five and ten MByte. 60 percent of our users use more than five GByte of their available space and 25 percent regularly send 500 MByte attachments all day long," he said. Upping his previous challenge, Weiss said that the company will give the first user who is able to fill up his inbox with legal content and without spam a dedicated server with a Petabyte (PByte) of space.
Weiss' motives are honorable, but there is no question that his business has to make money as every other firm does. According to him, the company which normally runs a biker's website with such services as classified ads "has the resources and the servers" to provide the service. The email service is funded by sponsors and advertising that is placed as banners on the page of the email inbox. Later on, users also agree to receive sponsored newsletters. However, Weiss said that he never would "flood" users with advertising or use pop-up ads since he "personally" does not like these forms of advertising.
If there is an service which sounds to be good to be true, common sense says that its probably true. But the fact about iTrade's service is that it is available and the only question about any such service may remain what really happens to the data which is stored on an outside server. The service has a privacy policy in place which states that "Hriders.com will never access, monitor, or remove project data unless required to respond to, react to, or investigate service issues, technical issues, our Terms of Service, or our Privacy Policy."
In our opinion, the iTrade's privacy today lacks the visibility and depth which would be needed to make us feel comfortable to store critical data on its servers. If its vision comes true, iTrade will sit on an enormous amount of private data - a situation that requires much more than the basic safeguarding policies described in the current privacy policy.
Nevertheless, a hriders.com email account provides without any doubt the largest amount of free external storage space. And there is always an argument for that.
