According to Greg Sterling, a Kelsey Group analyst, Google's Gmail killed any hope MSN or Yahoo! may have had of getting users to pay for mail storage." MSN & Yahoo still managed to squeeze a few pennies for mail storage above 250MB, however with Google's Gmail full scale launch imminent, Yahoo has leveled the playing field with Google's Gmail.

The company yesterday announced plans for an increase of current 250MB email boxes to 1 gb. The new mail box size will be available by Mid April. With More space comes more viruses, so Yahoo will provide software from Symantec Corp. to clean viruses detected in attachments
When Google introduced "Gmail," Yahoo provided just 4 megabytes of free e-mail storage. Yahoo, which runs the world's most popular Web site, has gradually increased its e-mail capacity in response to Google's competitive threat.

"They're removing storage as one of the deciding factors" when people chose a e-mail service, said Charlene Li, an analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc.