Newsfactor reports AOL plans to enter the free email arena and compete with
Yahoo, Hotmail and Google which offer different free and fee-based email services. Hotmail and Yahoo were forced to increase the amount of free space they offer to customers when Google launched Gmail, a free web-based email service with a 1 gigabyte of free space. The downside for AOL could be that they lose AOL subscribers
who only stuck around to keep AOL's popular email tools. AOL has been
slowly losing subscribers to broadband providers and cheap dial-up
competitors over the past couple years.