where do I sign up?

I know I'm a curmudgeon, but Gmail isn't the only game in town. I use it but if it starts failing to meet my needs, I'd go somewhere else in a heartbeat. It just so happens that I use them primarily as a spam filter since that's where I find the real value, so disk space isn't a huge issue with me.

It does feel to me like Google has had a hard time figuring out how to appropriately monetize products beyond it's core search ads offering. I believe it needs to figure it out in order to continue its success. At some point growth on AdSense will slow and it will need to have other revneue streams to be more than a one hit wonder.

Then again there is the prospect of multiple email accounts. I once used to have 6 or 7 Yahoo accounts to tide over the 'storage' issue and I could also separate different kinds of communication from different parties. I am still doing it and the emails worth archiving, I do not entrust them to a third-party mail server.

Retrospective price-tags on a hitherto free service may cause some hasty customer exits, some reduction in customer numbers. But I doubt many rely on things like Gmail or Yahoo for their bread-and-butter, that is business-related, mails.

Sorry, can pay, won't pay and at any rate, not all emails are worth keeping forever and ever.

BTW I wouldn't pay for gmail space, combining accounts, i can have for than 100 gigs...

I have a blog on software development, if you wan to see it, its http://riseagain.wordpress.com/

Will google ever provide free hosting service ?