Microsoft has extended the extra storage subscription option for MSN Hotmail to 13 new markets in a bid to drum up extra revenue from premium services.
Users in Asia, Europe and Australia can hold onto more of their Hotmail e-mail for longer, Microsoft said Thursday. The new offering includes 10M bytes of Hotmail storage space, 30M bytes of storage on MSN Groups and the ability to send or receive messages with attachments of up to 3M bytes.
Currently, a free Hotmail account only allows attachments of 1M bytes and storage of 2M bytes.
MSN Extra Storage also offers automatic virus scan on e-mail attachments and no account expiration.
Microsoft is hoping that it can draw extra revenue from the service, saying that 76 million Hotmail users now have access to the extra storage offer.
The move marks a trend among free e-mail providers who are layering more and more paid services on top of e-mail. Yahoo, for example, offers premium POP3 mail access and forwarding, storage, personal addresses and other paid offerings.
New MSN storage markets include Hong Kong, Singapore, Austria, Belgium, Sweden, Ireland, Finland and a Spanish-language service offered through YupiMSN in the U.S. The premium storage offering was initially launched in the U.S. in 2001.
Although the company did not immediately disclose the price for MSN Extra Storage in the new markets, in the U.S. the offering is priced at $19.95 a year.
