what would a gmail/pro account look like?

No Ads: they’re hardly noticeable as it is.
More disk Space: currently 2Gig, and that seems to be about as big a mail box ever gets. Unless you use it for backup
Functionality: Well, if you changed it to a backup service behind a mail & ftp client then you could charge the users who dont normally look at the ads. Plus a plethora of addtional features such as smart aliasing, real folders, etc that advanced users may want on top of their deliberately simple interface of one inbox for everything.

I would pay for it if it would login to my other accounts all over the net and put them in one spot, like your desktop apps.

I agree w/ Pauric. What are the added services that they’d offer that they don’t offer now?

Yahoo and Hotmail both do pay for accounts and that’s fine for them, but they really don’t offer that much of an incentive to do it.

Josh, what would you want from Gmail that you aren’t already getting?

I’m not sure what I would want, as I only use it to back up stuff. Perhaps IMAP access?

So is that the general feeling? It can’t really be improved enough to charge for?

I can think of two reasons why Google wouldn’t charge for Gmail:

* Email is a sticky app. People come for email, and stay for news, weather, search, etc. It provides residual value to the rest of your network–from what I’ve heard, a lot of value–even if you don’t make money from it directly.

* Parity with competitors. Yahoo and Hotmail are developing free, rich email apps on par with Gmail, so it doesn’t make sense to charge for things your competitors will be giving away for free. Still, Google could put a lot of pressure on Y!/MS by continuing to add features to Gmail and forcing them to play catch up.

I think Richard’s suggestion is good though (and might even pay for it).

Gene, you raise some interesting ideas that I’d like to address at a high level.

1)Google could put a lot of pressure on Y!/MS by continuing to add features to Gmail

I would argue that gmail is more fully featured than the current offerings (I havent seen y!mail 2.0 though) Free forwarding, largest space, text only ads, smart addressing, from login to inbox is quick in most cases etc

featurecreep for the sake of one-upmanship in the free email client game might not necessarily lead to a better product or more users.

There’s also a fundamental design premise behind gmail that differs it from y!mail. One inbox for everything and no need to delete (although that just changed) But the concept as I understand it is to differentiate from its competitors not compete directly feature by feature. While I dont agree with the information architecture behind gmail I do appreciate the simplicity in flow, sometimes contraining but refreshingly simple.

2)People come for email, and stay for news.

Do they? is there any evidence to suggest that users have these secondary backup goals once they’ve completed checking their emails? Personally I doubt its as important as you suggest. I read news and check email in the morning, I check email again periodically until lunch time when I check news, then email only until the evening. I rarely find myself looking for something to keep me amused once I’ve completed my immediate goal of checking email. I either respond to mail or move on to my next task.

Sorry, this sounds like I’m arguing with you, just voicing a different opinion and would value your response – thanks – pauric

Oh, and regarding Richard’s suggestion. Its techincally available in the current version. From your primary email address you can invite yourself to another address. In those address you can forward all mail to the primary. The primary can then filter incoming mail accordingly.

Yes, this is an email aliasing hack, but its essentially what you’re willing to pay for.

The issue is highlighted with the serive http://www.mail.com who have a pay for service and nobble the free service with pop-ups and no spam filtering. The result, people left it in droves.

Yahoo will switch off ads, forwarding (free on gmail) and gave you more storage (2 gig free on gmail) if you pony up the cash. This isnt a better service, this is the existing free service with minor limitations removed. People will deal with minor limitations and will not pay to have their 80% efficient product de-nobbled up to 100%, they will pay to have the perfectly good 100% efficient product improved to 120%.

Why do you think Google considers Gmail a primarily software service, as opposed to a data gathering tool? We are doing work–providing contextual ad space–for them by using Gmail, they have no incentive to discourage us from doing that. A paid version of the service would not contribute to that purpose.

The issue with relying on advertising has been reflected in the recent fluctuations of Google’s stock price in my view.

Why would Google provide paid-for-email services when my company http://www.emailhosting.com provides those services? In fact, if Google wanted to enter this arena, why wouldn’t they just pay me and buy emailhosting.com from me for a cazillion bucks? Ha Ha!

C’mon Google…make me an offer I can’t refuse and you will be #1 in the email hosting market, a billion dollar market!

gmail as-is provides a number of solid features combined into a single package which rivals that found on any other email service.

the idea of a paid version of gmail seems unlikely. step back and look at any of the other google services. i have yet to see any charges for any of these robust web services. in google’s handbook, free = profit. offer solid [free] services to internet users, and reap the benefits of advertisers knocking on your door for access specific markets.

the only feature worth paying for on gmail would be added file storage minus the 10mb limit. even then, why pay for that when there are services which offer file storage?

I realize that Google isn’t charging for many of their web services, and I’m not suggesting they start charging for everything. My question is more simple: why not just include a paid-for version of Gmail above and beyond the regular version?

I doubt it would negatively affect the free version, and might even help it.

A corporate version of gmail (they already offer intranet search engines…) would be great too…

Josh, I would argue that a paid for version does damage the free version by implying in some way the free version is sub-standard.

Also, the inclusion of g-talk in to g-mail is faulted. Why would a user go to their ‘email’ to initiate a voip conversation?

What they need to do is focus on contacts first, method of communicating with the contact second.

In the same way a person doesnt look at the mail box then start writing a letter, nor will putting the telephone beside your mailbox mean any cross usage. Yes, its nice, but is it good design – no way!

In my world I would have a open standards address book which allows a user to select whom they want to communicate with, then select the mode of communication. In the same way I make decisions based on knowledge of the person I want to contact, the time of day, day of the week, all this determines which mode I chose. The use case of ‘I happen to be checking g-mail and then initiate a voip call off the bat, or in response to an email’ is not a strong one.

What they’ve done is nice, but yet again Google fails to address a wider solution focusing on compartementalised revisions to their products.

my bad, this is just IM “Gmail’s new chat features, while integrated with the Google Talk network, do not allow you to make or receive calls to your friends over your computer. You still need to download the Google Talk Windows client for that. This download also allows you to be online all the time without having Gmail or your browser open. We think it’s worthwhile to use both products. They are free, after all.”

But I standby the premise of my comments. This feature introduction does not appear to be task orientated, to me at least.