• by March 23, 2005

There's more love in Yahoo! land. Just a few weeks ago, the Internet giant gave us a free scoop of ice cream (courtesy of Baskin-Robbins) to celebrate its 10th birthday. True, we never did redeem that scoop (the coupon was valid for one day and well, we didn't get around to B-R), but freebies are good.

Yahoo! says it's upping its free e-mail storage by 1 gigabyte - four times more than it currently offers - in part to compete with Google's Gmail, which already offers 1 gigabyte of free storage and is expected to end beta testing soon. Will Microsoft's Hotmail match it? Hotmail's storage limit is still 250 megabytes.

Yahoo! also says it's improving antivirus protection features for users of its free e-mail service, something that America Online has made a priority for subscribers; commercials for AOL currently running are all about virus protection, in particular. Yahoo! says it will offer users of its free e-mail service the ability to get rid of viruses from attachments. This feature was previously only available for paying customers.

Now if you want to pay for e-mail storage, Yahoo! and Microsoft each offer 2 gigabytes of storage for $20 a year.