Ha! GMail offered the most free space, by an order of magnitude over its competitors, and that's the primary reason it succeeded in drawing users initially. Em

Ha! GMail offered the most free space, by an order of magnitude over its competitors, and that's the primary reason it succeeded in drawing users initially. Email search wasn't the draw initially, and wasn't even all that much better; there was serious controversy over search, years later, as it was tied to ads that reflected the content of private communications. Hotmail, Yahoo et al had reasonably good search for the time, but stiflingly little free space. Google offered far more free space with IMAP and POP3 access.