Yahoo! customers will get unlimited email storage from this May.

Punters already get 1GB but plunging costs of storage technology mean the company can now remove the upper limit. The company says most of its users don't get anywhere near the upper storage limits anyway.

The offer is for personal, non-commercial use only - users will have to follow a fair-use policy. The company will consider extending the extension to other Yahoo! services like its photo hosting service Flickr.

The deal is worldwide but excludes China and Japan, according to Reuters. In the case of China, this should make it easier for Yahoo! to keep track of dissidents' email, should it want to.

Yahoo!'s UK press office was not returning phone calls this morning but the company's blog tells us: "When Yahoo! Mail launched 10 years ago, users got a whopping 4MB of storage for their entire mailbox. Today, you would fill that up with a single picture from your weekend." Total capacity when Yahoo! launched its mail service was 200GB for all accounts. Yahoo! users originally got just 4MB of storage.

The blog warns that "anti-abuse" measures will be put in place and that the roll-out will likely take some months.

Other email providers are expected to follow suit shortly.

More from Yahoo! here (http://yodel.yahoo.com/). ®

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