Yahoo! has raised the stakes in its increasingly-tough e-mail war with its big Web search rival Google
It plans to give its paying e-mail customers two gigabytes of storage space and boost the size limits on free accounts.
Yahoo! - making good on an earlier vow to boost the storage it provides users of its e-mail services - also said it was removing the advertisements they once received.
In addition, the California-based company has moved to a single premium e-mail service, instead of several at different rates.
Google had earlier announced plans for its Gmail service that gives users one gigabyte of free storage - far more than that offered by Yahoo! or Microsoft's Hotmail.
On free e-mail accounts, Yahoo! is expanding storage to 100 megabytes from four megabytes and upping the message size limit to 10 megabytes from three.
On other fronts, Yahoo! said it has made the e-mail search function speedier and that it is opening "tens of millions" of name spaces by re-releasing Yahoo! addresses that have been dormant for several years.