The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

Yahoo! inboxes get 25 times bigger

Fighting off Google

Free whitepaper – Thermal design of Dell PowerEdge server

Yahoo! is increasing the amount of storage its email subscribers get to fight off the challenge from Google's Gmail service.

From today free email accounts will be increased to 100MB, from 4Mb now. Some people with older accounts have 6MB. Yahoo! Mail Plus users, who pay for the service, will see their inboxes grow to 2GB of storage. Charges will be cut from $29.99 to $19.99 a year.

The move is widely seen as an attempt to fend off the challenge of Google and its Gmail service which will offer users 1000MB. In beta-test. Gmail's revenue is derived from adverts targeted by searching through users' email messages. This has implications for both privacy and security and is hugely controversial.

Yahoo! Mail is also getting a tweaked redesign today. The company is tempting new users, or existing users to sign up to more accounts, by opening up addresses that have been inactive for some time. Yahoo! currently bins email addresses that have been dormant for more than six months. ®

Related stories

40k hit by Telewest email snag
Lycos cuts ribbon on 1GB email service
Yahoo! and Google escalate portal wars

Free whitepaper – Dell PowerEdge servers 2009 - Memory

Don’t Miss

DustbinDirty, dirty PCs: The X-rated picture guide

Ventblockers Horror beyond human imagination

SC09Top 500 supers - rise of the Linux quad-cores

SC09 Jaguar munches Roadrunner

Ubuntu teaser Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala

Smooth Windows upgrade it ain't

Sign up, sign up for The Register IT security newsletter

Narrowcasting for the email classes