Yahoo offers unlimited email storage

Yahoo is planning to offer unlimited storage to its free Web-based e-mail users, in a move that could herald similar offers from rivals such as Google.

Unlimited storage will be available from Yahoo this May. It will be made available globally, except for in China and Japan, where discussions on storage plans are continuing.

The decision is in response to growth in the number and size of attachments as people share photos, music and videos via e-mail.

The cost of storage has also plummeted with new PCs able to store up to a trillion bytes of data.

Yahoo currently offers 1 gigabyte of storage for its free mail service and 2GB for its premium fee-based service.

At the moment Google offers 2.5GB of free storage with its Gmail service, while Windows Live Hotmail offers 2GB of free storage.

However, Yahoo have announced no plans to help users report abuse of the free Yahoo email service, which at present is the provider of choice for scammers and spammers online.