Thursday, 16 November 2006

MSN Hikes Hotmail Capacity to 1GB

Three years after Google launched the 2 GB e-mail service, Microsoft has finally decided to increase the storage in its Hotmail e-mail service to 1GB from the present 250MB. Hotmail has over 260 million users and Microsoft had been delaying increasing the storage.

The upgrade, that began on November 7, will be applicable to ten Asian countries such as Australia, China, India, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand and Singapore.

“As we continue to ramp up our Windows Live services across Asia, we also remain focused on enhancing the capabilities of the MSN Hotmail service for our users,” said Alex Stewart, Asia Pacific Regional Director, Online Services Group, Microsoft.

Besides upgrading the storage limit, Microsoft has also extended the expiration period for inactive accounts from 30 days to 60 days for those accounts that are more than two years old.