Polish Web portal O2.pl upgraded its free e-mail service on Tuesday, extending the storage of inboxes over 12 times to 250MB. Users are able to send attachments up to 20MB. Currently, O2.pl offers the largest free mailboxes in Poland.
The company’s decision to boost its e-mail storage came as a surprise. Tuesday morning, Interia.pl — one of the biggest Polish Web portals — announced it would be increasing the capacity of its free e-mail boxes to 100MB (similar to Yahoo Inc.’s latest offer). Three hours later, O2.pl launched its new service.
O2.pl currently offers 250MB of storage to Internet users for free (previously it offered 20MB of space). The size of attachments was extended five times to 20MB. Users are also provided with free antispam and antivirus systems. No ads are attached to the sent messages. A HTML editor is also available.
“We launched our new offer for the convenience of our users,” said Michal Branski, chairman of O2.pl. “We are going to establish our position on the market as a leader of free communicational services.”
There are 2.3 million of free, active e-mail boxes at O2.pl.
The e-mail war in Poland has just started. Over three months after the first information about Google Inc.’s Gmail was revealed, Polish Web companies started to upgrade their free e-mail services. The company that took the first step was Interia.pl with its 100MB offer. Later came O2.pl and its offer, which currently is the most attractive one. Wirtualna Polska (Wp.pl), the second biggest Web portal, admitted it was also considering the upgrade of its e-mail service. So said other smaller companies.
Only Onet.pl, the biggest Polish Web portal, has decided against the plan to boost e-mail storage. It provides 20MB free mail accounts. “We are not considering upgrading our free e-mail accounts,” said Mariusz Biedrzycki, marketing manager of Onet.pl. “But we do plan to introduce some new attractive changes of the interface of our service.”
He was not able to reveal any details.