The upgrade will increase Hotmail’s free e-mail storage limits from 2 megabytes to 250MB and its paid e-mail service, which costs $19.95 a year, from 10MB to 2 gigabytes. The changes will begin in early July.
"With these new offers, storage will not be an issue for MSN Hotmail customers, " Blake Irving, corporate vice president of communication services for MSN, said in a statement.
The storage follows similar announcements from Google and Yahoo. The storage boost started when Google announced in April that it plans to launch a new email service gmail that will give people 1GB of storage for free. The service has attracted some controversy, because it will serve advertisements based on keywords found in the text of peoples’ e-mail messages.
Indeed, Google’s initial steps into storage increases countered the industry’s trend to charge extra for more memory. Over the past few years, Yahoo and Hotmail have both taken steps to decrease memory in hopes of convincing free users to become paying subscribers.