The increasingly competitive Web mail market has a new player: Instant messaging provider ICQ. The company now offers a fee-based service that includes 2GB of storage, a calendar feature, task manager, notepad, wireless access, and support for both POP3 (Post Office Protocol 3) and IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol).
ICQ, owned by America Online, will announce the service, which costs $19.99 per year, this week says Ronen Arad, ICQ director of product management. The service also includes spam filtering and blocking, protection against viruses and a 20MB ceiling on files sent or received. The service offers a feature that translates messages into seven languages, the ability to compress large attachments and WAP (Wireless Access Protocol) support for access from a mobile device. The features in this Web mail service make it a real competitor to services from other providers, such as Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google, whose Gmail service is still in a beta version.