Free e-mail becomes fee e-mail: I got quoted in this article and had the opportunity to attract attention towards smaller players who try a lot harder to justify the fees they ask for, than the Big Two do. Of course these "underdogs" face several challenges that won't be easily overcome, from getting their name better known to being able to scale as they add more customers. But since they're not trying to please two different if not opposite targets (users and advertisers,) they benefit from a strong differentiator against Hotmail and Yahoo. They might eventually appear as more significant in the marketplace than the huge number of free users served by their bigger competitors would suggest.