Lycos is upping the amount of storage available to its free email subscribers to 300MB while those paying for its premier service will get a whopping 10GB. Subscribers pay £3.49 a month for 10GB storage. This beats Yahoo which offers 100MB and Hotmail which is still offering just 2MB, depsite promising an expanded service this summer. Google's Gmail service offers 1GB.

Lycos claims this gives enough space to store 5m text emails - a lifetime's worth apparently [don't email us, we didn't do the maths - ed] - or 200,000 digital images or 25,000 music files.

Wessel van Rensburg, Lycos Email and Mobile Product Manager, said: "People's use of data has changed considerably with the growth of digital media such as music and photography. The LYCOS UK FreeMail 300MB service means there is a free webmail product on the market with sufficient storage for medium email users to be able to share images and documents - something they would struggle to do on Hotmail's paltry 2MB service."

The service is branded the "Online Drive" - it can be synched with Outlook to make appointments, contacts and other documents available online from any computer. ®

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