Apple Increases .Mac Storage to 250 MB, but Still Lags -- In a bow to the decreased costs of storage and competition from free Web mail services, Apple has increased the storage included with a .Mac account for combined iDisk storage and email from 100 MB to 250 MB. Of that, you can choose the ratio of storage used by Mail and your iDisk, which starts at 125 MB each by default. Apple has also dropped the price tremendously for additional storage: 1 gigabyte (GB) total is now available for $50 per year. The maximum email attachment size is also now 10 MB.

<http://www.mac.com/>

The previous storage size for .Mac was appearing increasingly paltry in the face of Google's Gmail service - still in beta testing - which upped the ante for free Web-based email to 1 GB. Services like Yahoo and Hotmail only included a few megabytes of storage with their free accounts. One gigabyte has now become a magic number for email services. [GF]