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Hotmail, Microsoft's Web e-mail service, this week increased the storage allowance of its paying customers to 2GB, coming through on a pledge made a month ago.
Users who had been paying as much as $60 annually for additional Hotmail storage capacity were upgraded this week to the new $20-per-year Hotmail Plus. The new offering provides 2GB of storage, ups the size of permitted file attachments to 20MB each, and dumps the graphical advertisements that free users see.
Storage has become a defining topic for free e-mail services since this spring, when Google announced it would launch its Gmail with 1GB of space. That forced rivals to react. In June, Yahoo boosted its Yahoo Mail storage allowance to 100MB for free users and 2GB for those paying a $20 annual fee. One week later, Microsoft announced it would match Yahoo on the paid side, and up the ante to 250MB for free accounts.
That last boost in space remains in the near future; Microsoft plans to increase the amount of storage for free accounts during August.
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