Just a few minutes ago, Hushmail announced that they have increased the storage quota for their premium users. For their regular Premium users, the quota has been increased to 1GB, and for their ‘Premium + Desktop Access’ the quota has been increased to 10GB.
A few days back, we posted a review of Hushmail, and one of the biggest complaints Chris (our reviewer) had was related to the low storage quota. Shortly after we published the article, Hushmail reached out to us and told us about this planned increase in storage. Hushmail also mentioned that a new interface will be launched in 2010, as the user interface was another thing Chris pointed out as a shortcoming in Hushmail.
Let’s just hope Hushmail are planning to increase the free accounts from the existing 2MB to something more reasonable (perhaps 250MB, as the old premium quota was). If the new interface is good enough, and free quota is increased to something reasonable, Hushmail might just have the right concept to attack Google’s Gmail / Apps where it hurts, namely privacy.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Hushmail, Email Service Guide. Email Service Guide said: @Hushmail radically increases storage for premium users http://bit.ly/5IN6vl [...]
Besides privacy the free e-mail services lack in support. In my experience and one of the reasons I purchased Hushmail Premium is because of my poor experience with Hotmail support and frankly, you get what you pay for. Support is one of Hushmails really strong sides which somewhat is overshadowed by their privacy policy. Swift and professional answers and it seems like you have the same support person all the time which is kind of neat. It also seems like Hushmail is listening to their users requests for improvements although some smaller improvements should have been done years ago. I do have a feeling that their development team won’t disapoint users in 2010!
Concerning the small storage limit on free accounts I think the article got something wrong with the business strategy of Hushmail. For me it seems like they are not aiming to be the next Gmail or Yahoo but rather aiming their services to people who values their privacy and who don’t want annoying ads. The free accounts seems just to be for people who want to try out the service or when necessary want to be able send asecure message to a regular Hushmail-user.
Somewhere along the line Hushmail must make a profit and I rather pay a couple of bucks each year to get an e-mail account with high privacy, good reliability which is free of ads and comes with good support. The only thing that worries me are if they’re going to raise their prices due to extending the sizes of the accounts!
One good idea to improve Hushmails reputation after the steroid bust (google hushmail steorid bust) in which Hushmail gave out decrypted mail after a court order is to move the servers to a more appropriate country. I don’t believe criminals should be protected and one way for Hushmail to counter that and still provide 100% privacy is to provide servers in a appropriate country for those users who pay by credit card thus identifying themselves.