Google, the dominant Internet search company, is planning to raise the stakes in its intensifying competition with Yahoo and Microsoft by unveiling a new consumer-oriented e-mail service.
The new service, to be named Gmail, is scheduled to be released on Thursday, according to people involved with the plan.
It will be "soft launched," they said, in a manner that Google has followed with other features that it has added to its Web site, with little fanfare and presented initially as a long-running test.
E-mail has become a crucial weapon in the competition to win the allegiance of Internet users, who often turn to one or two Web sites as the foundation for their online activities.
As MSN, from Microsoft, and Yahoo are preparing to attack Google's role as the first place most people turn to conduct an Internet search, Google is hoping to counter those assaults by moving onto the turf they have already claimed in providing e-mail services as part of their portals.
Google is starting far behind Microsoft (34.4 million users, according to the Nielsen Net Ratings), AOL (31.8 million), and Yahoo (39.9 million).
But Google, which is based in Mountain View, California, plans to play on its information search strength to compete with the existing services.
Google will offer consumers better access to searching their own e-mail and could well upset the industry balance by offering free access to services that previously were available only by paying a monthly subscription fee.
The standard industry practice is to offer tiered e-mail services, providing only limited storage free and charging higher fees to users who want to preserve a larger number of e-mail messages for capabilities such as online storage.
But Google plans a service to be supported by advertising that will permit users to store vast amounts of mail at no cost.
One Google study put the operational cost of maintaining e-mail storage at less than US$2 a gigabyte, enough to preserve tens of thousands of messages of typical length.
Google's entry into the e-mail business will sharpen the lines between the major competing portals such as Yahoo and MSN and the Internet service providers such as AOL and Earthlink.
But Google could find that an e-mail service that is advertising-based could also raise thorny privacy issues.
Many people inside the company are worried that users might fear that the content of their e-mail messages could be used to tailor individual advertising messages, much as ad messages are now placed on pages tied to specific responses to search inquiries.
Google hopes to quell any such concerns by assuring users that the content of their messages will remain private.
Google's e-mail service, however, could also put new strains on the company's extensive network of servers, which is now devoted almost exclusively to offering immediate responses to search-engine queries.
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