Yahoo! offers "unlimited" email storage

Web portal Yahoo! will begin offering "virtually unlimited storage" for its paid email customers and will upgrade free users to 100MB.

The upgrade is part of an overall enhancement for Yahoo! Mail that will launch this summer. Besides additional storage, the service will get a face-lift and tie in more Yahoo!-branded services, such as Photos and Messenger.

The announcement comes a month after search rival Google said it would launch a free email service called Gmail that offers 1GB of storage, considerably more space than free versions of Yahoo! Mail and Microsoft's Hotmail. Yahoo! currently offers 4MB of storage to free users of its email service.

The company's decision to boost its email storage is not surprising. A day before Gmail details were unveiled, Yahoo! sent emails to some customers in hopes of gauging their interest in receiving 100MB of storage.

The company said the email was just a typical consumer survey for its "loyal consumer base" and denied that it had any relation to the news of Gmail.

Jim Hu writes for News.com