Walla began offering the service in Israel last week, where it has around 1 million users, but has now announced that the service is available globally at walla.com .
Competition in the free e-mail market has heated up recently with Google, known best for their search engine, planning the release of ‘G-mail’, a free one gigabyte service, which is currently in its testing phase. Lycos Europe has released its own 1gigabyte e-mail service, but is charging a fee. Yahoo has boosted its free e-mail storage space to 100 megabytes (up from four) but Walla is the first to offer a gigabyte of storage space free.
Walla's free service, which also includes an inbox search feature as well as an anti-virus application, will be paid for by advertisements, though users can pay $15 a year to get rid of the ads. Walla says users will be able to save some 40,000 e-mails, 2,000 photos and 50, one-minute video clips.
Walla's 1 million e-mail users, primarily located in Israel, have already been bumped up from 6 megabytes of storage to 1 gigabyte.
Competition in the free e-mail market has heated up recently with Google, known best for their search engine, planning the release of ‘G-mail’, a free one gigabyte service, which is currently in its testing phase. Lycos Europe has released its own 1gigabyte e-mail service, but is charging a fee. Yahoo has boosted its free e-mail storage space to 100 megabytes (up from four) but Walla is the first to offer a gigabyte of storage space free.
Walla's free service, which also includes an inbox search feature as well as an anti-virus application, will be paid for by advertisements, though users can pay $15 a year to get rid of the ads. Walla says users will be able to save some 40,000 e-mails, 2,000 photos and 50, one-minute video clips.
Walla's 1 million e-mail users, primarily located in Israel, have already been bumped up from 6 megabytes of storage to 1 gigabyte.