Yahoo! Mail ups storage – get ready for Gmail coming out of beta

By Charlene Li

Y! Mail announced that they would increase storage to 1 GB, up from 250 MB. That now matches Google’s Gmail offering, byte for byte (MSN’s Hotmail is still offering 250MB of storage, but you can expect the inevitable announcement in a few weeks).

In addition, Y! Mail is also adding free anti-virus cleaning to its existing free anti-virus detection service from Norton.

Why are they doing this? It appears Google is readying Gmail for primetime, having recently increased the number of invitation to the beta test to 50 per existing user. Y! Mail is one of the three major “doorways” for user to enter Yahoo!, the others being the home page and MyYahoo!. It makes sense for the company to defend the it’s position, especially when it comes to preserving user loyalty.

What it means: Get ready for a full out battle on the free Web-based email front, as Gmail, Y!Mail, and Hotmail battle it out. Look for more feature creep in the areas of POP access, mail forwarding, and especially given the Gmail user interface, more dynamic scripting.

Comments

[raghu]

Hope
Gmail will BEAT other mail services as u see further and further as it is a quite superb experience using gmail providing in its developing stage!!!!!!!
and and and just use it to get experienced !!(in a fully supported browser)
AS IT IS DAMN THING USING IN A PARTIALLY SUPPORTED ONE!!!!!!