Gmail will get paid ..

I keep wondering will a time come when the users have to pay for having an email account and the allied services that come with that. One of my first email accounts apart from the traditional hotmail in the year 1997 was with a site called netaddress.com. It became paid in the year 2000 and after that I have never heard about that site.

Hotmail used to be a 2MB account and yahoo a 4 Mb and then came Gmail as usual google gave a new definition to the "email" with gmail. It gave an mind boggling capacity of 2 GB un heard in the industry which forced the traditional leaders like hotmail and
yahoo to expand not just the mail size but also the service offering and last week Yahoo broke the size barrier and made itunlimited. I keep wondering the kind of infrastructure required to service the userbase and with the ever increasing voracious requirements for space.Where will the money come from ? will the advertising revenue be sufficient to make profits ?

Now more and more services across the portals are getting integrated and people depending on them much more than in the past. Even google is promting a single sign on identity for its various acquired properties like Youtube, blogspot and orkut. Yahoo was the first of the block but in the last 2 years except the acquisistion of flickr it has not gone any where , not really leveraged the wide spectrum of content it could have integrated.

I forsee a situation where email accounts will get paid and that money being asked will not be for the email but for the sign on identity. Ultimately the email id will become the most important weapon in the hands of these service providers to charge and who else but GOOGLE may be the trend setter and considering the kind of data I have on blog,picasa,orkut etc I might pay even though may not be willing to.