After Yahoo, Microsoft Announces Email Storage Expansion

Microsoft had some huge news this week. And when I mean huge, I actually mean great and in fact I'm using the term ironically. Right, if you have been paying attention to your news, Yahoo has announced that it will deliver unlimited email storage as of May 2007 to celebrate its 10th anniversary. Well, Microsoft has also done something in this aspect. And as a result, it had some good news and some not so good news.

"If you are a Hotmail Plus customer who is participating in the Windows Live Hotmail beta, you may have noticed that your Message Inbox storage meter capacity has increased from 2 Gb to 4 Gb. That's the great news. The not-so-great news is that while the storage meter on your Today page may have been upgraded, not all account inboxes have automatically been increased on the back-end yet. This seems like putting the cart before the horse," revealed a member of the Windows Live Mail team.

According to the Redmond Company, the storage upgrade will be rolled out gradually to all users. This means that Windows Live Hotmail Plus customers will not all benefit from the storage extension simultaneously. In some cases, Microsoft has informed that the same user might experience this over different accounts. Now truth be told, I have only 1 GB of storage space on my MSN Hotmail account and no matter how hard I try, I cannot get the thing filled. But still, unlimited storage sounds like a too good incentive.

"If you are a Hotmail Plus customer who has opted in to the Windows Live Hotmail beta and you try to store more than 2 Gb of data in your account, you may run into a storage error for short term. We have already begun rolling out the upgrade and hope to have it completed in the next two weeks or so," Microsoft revealed.

Microsoft mail users that are not included into the Windows Live Hotmail Beta will not be affected by the storage modification in any way. The same is true for MSN Hotmail or Windows Live Hotmail free customers.