Hotmail follows suit, to boost storage to 250MB

Following Google's shot across the free e-mail bow with the 1GB Gmail offering (still in Beta mode), Yahoo!Mail boosted its online storage limit (for non-paying users) to 100MB. Microsoft announced this week that come early July, it will boost its free Hotmail users' storage capacity to 250MB and provide anti-virus scanning.

Free, web-based e-mail wars? I don't know. But the increased storage is great for users, and Hotmail's move may very well make it more competitive with Yahoo!Mail, which has been a long-time leader.

E-mail makes users sticky, i.e. they'll come back again and again to the provider/portal, and consistent users mean better advertising revenue. Many will use all three (and/or others), but the increased storage may encourage some users to become much more faithful to one of the now-myriad offerings.

MyWay and a few others are also increasing storage to 125MB, per the article.

You should also check out oddpost, which is reputedly a fantastic web-based e-mail product.