In what would seem to be a direct response to Google's upcoming GMail service with a 1GB storage limit, Yahoo! Mail today increased storage limits across it's range of mail services.
Users of the Yahoo! Mail Plus service will see their inboxes grow to a massive 2 Gigabytes of storage (twice as much as GMail), at a cost effective œ11.99 a year. Users of the free mail service, who previously had between 4 and 6 Megabytes of storage, will see their mail accounts grow to an adequate 100MB, with an increased attachment size of 10MB. The interface has also been redesigned slightly to offer a faster mail service.
With the cost of storage now far lower than ever before, it was really about time that web based services started increasing their miserly account limits. Obviously something was needed to kickstart them into action, and Google's GMail service has filled that role brilliantly. Whether or not Yahoo's new limit will be enough to retain their users is something that is yet to be seen, the free gigabyte from Google is clearly going to be a temptation to many.
No news yet from Hotmail as to whether or not they'll be increasing their mailboxes capacities, but we think it'll only be a matter of time before they have no choice but to do so.
Let's hope so.