Apple computer announced on its Web site on Wednesday that it will increase the amount of space subscribers have for their online file storage and e-mail to 250MB. The company previously gave members 15MB of e-mail storage and 100MB of space in their iDisk, an online storage drive.
Customers of the $99-per-year service can pay an additional $49 to upgrade their storage limit to 1GB.
The move comes as other e-mail providers, including Microsoft and Yahoo, have been increasing limits for those with both paid and free accounts. The move intensified after Google announced its free Gmail service--still in limited testing mode--which offers a gigabyte of space. Apple enthusiast site Spymac Network also offers free e-mail accounts with 1GB of space.
Apple made other changes to its service as well, adding the ability to have additional e-mail aliases and an online tool for spell-checking e-mail. The maximum size of an individual e-mail is also being increased, to 10MB.
The Mac maker had some problems with its e-mail service earlier this week when, for a short time, e-mails for some customers were returned to the sender along with a message that the customer was over the storage limit, though that wasn't the case.