Should I start a new Email Service?

Two days back I received an email from one of my loyal visitor which reads as follow

Dear Kishore,

I have been trying different methods to make money online but I have still not found a way to earn good consistent income. I have been working online for more than 6 months now. One of my friends suggested me to start a free email service like Gmail and earn money by serving ads or if you suggest some good method to monetize the service. I have sufficient funding to run the service without making any revenue.

I would like to hear from you, your opinion on this project.

I get such kind of emails very frequently and try to reply to such emails as far as possible. With regard to this particular project, I had to reply in a negative approach for some reasons.

Business Model – The idea is good, but I feel it would be very difficult to get people to use such service for many reasons. Currently, services like GMail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail are doing very well and I feel to get people to migrate from their existing email clients would be very difficult. Gmail leading in the free email service is too good to compete. Gmail has great features which would be almost impossible to compete. Check out this un-official gmail site for more information. Gmail offers so much of features and you see improvements every day so why should somebody leave Gmail and use a new service. Gmail’s biggest advantage is the connectivity with other Google services which no other service can match in very near future.

I was very much interested in a similar project 5 years back and I had done a lot of studies on this topic. I found that running an email service has lots of complications like hardware resources, managing spam, security would be of biggest concerns and I had dropped the idea. I had even negotiated with Quality Unit to get a software similar to Gmail (Support Centre) to run the service.

I would not suggest to go for a business model which is dominated by a powerful company like Google. Its always better to think about services which should be new and people would get tempted to try rather than trying to do something which is already done by big business leaders.