Yahoo!, Hotmail and Excite Respond to Gmail

Yahoo! Mail has recently enhanced its standard and premium services in response to Google's upcoming Gmail launch. On June 15, Yahoo! Mail increased its storage space to 100 MB for standard users and 2 GB for Yahoo! Mail Plus users. The 2 GB for Plus users is double the storage of Gmail. Yahoo increased the maximum size message that users can send and receive, now up to 10 MB per message.

Yahoo! Mail improved its email search capability and will put more than 50 million email addresses back into distribution. They have also redesigned the web-based email user interface to increase usability.

Hotmail has announced July 2004 plans to upgrade its free email offering in a similar manner to Yahoo! by upgrading services and mail storage capacities. They plan to offer free subscribers 250 MB of storage, up from the current 2 MB limit. Hotmail also plans to offer its anti-virus service for free: it will clean any viruses identified in a subscriber's email. Until now, Hotmail has alerted subscribers of a virus, but not cleaned it or removed it from access.

Excite will soon be increasing storage space from 3 MB to 125 MB for its free email users. They will also increase the maximum size message that users can send and receive, similar to Yahoo! Mail, to 10 MB.