Apple Computer increased the combined storage of its .Mac e-mail and iDisk services to 250 megabytes on Wednesday, following a trend by Yahoo and Google in recent months to increase storage capacity of free and fee-based Web-based e-mail and storage services.
The default storage for e-mail will now be 125MB, but users can configure their storage in the Account Settings area based upon their needs (see screen shot below). For example giving 150MB for e-mail and 100MB for iDisk storage. The most iDisk space you can set the system up for is 235MB.
In June, Apple added e-mail aliases, an online spell checker with a customizable dictionary and increased the maximum message size from 3MB to 10MB.
The additional storage space is a combined total for US$99.99 a year. When first launched in July of 2002, .Mac separated maximum storage space for e-mail at 15MB and iDisk at 100MB.
In comparison, Yahoo in June increased the capacity of its free e-mail service from 4MB to 100MB and increased the maximum size of a single message from 3MB to 10MB. Users of its premium Yahoo Mail Plus service receive 2 gigabytes of e-mail storage for $19.99, $29.99 for 25MB, $39.99 for 50MB, and $59.99 for 100MB.
Googleis Gmail rocked the Web mail market in April when it announced its free Web-based e-mail service that offered 1GB of storage capacity.
Over the past few months .Mac users have complained through online message and blogger sites that the storage capacity of the Apple service was not comparable with competing services. "(Appleis) current .Mac subscription offers (among other stuff like 100 MB Web space and calendar syncing) 15MB of email storage, which doesnit look like such a good value anymore like it did two years ago," wrote one blogger on his personal site.
Bryan Chaffin contributed for this article.