[shakna]

> None of these things were new, more inbox space and better spam protection were available for real email services. But the point of every other free email service at the time, including Hotmail post acquisition, was to upsell you their paid service.

Hotmail and the like required a US address and credit card for their premium service, though.

They weren't options where I was. And nor is it the norm anymore.

[xorcist]

You were simply not part of their business model. The point is that their competitors were all freemium. It's not that their competitors were technically incompetent and didn't know how to buy storage or build spam filters but that they were crippled on purpose.