Yahoo! has gotten aboard the mega-free e-mail bandwagon, increasing the account sizes from a mere 4 megabytes of storage to 100 megabytes and allowing messages of up to 10 megabytes. They’ve been talking about it for awhile but it finally took effect this morning.
PC Pro — Google spurs Yahoo! email refresh
Yahoo! says it will boost storage for its email services in a bid to take some of the steam out of Google’s free 1GB Gmail service.
The Yahoo! free mail service jumps from 3MB message and 4MB storage limits to 10MB and 100MB respectively.
It has also streamlined its premium paid-for email, which previously ranged from $29.99 to $59.99 a year for 25MB and 100MB respectively to a single service priced at $19.99 with a massive 2GB of storage.
The company will also weed out banner and other graphical ads from the service, a feature that Yahoo! will no doubt play on in espousing the benefits of its service over Gmail, which runs targeted ads within messages.
Actually, Yahoo! is way in front of Google on this one, since Google’s service is a beta that’s available only to a select few customers, whereas Yahoo’s is available to its entire existing customer base and to those who sign up for new accounts instantly. Indeed, there is a bidding war going on to get a G-mail account; one wonders if that will stop now.
