Hotmail offers 250 mb email storage space

Update (2/26/2005): If you want to increase your hotmail space, please see this page. I have not tried it yet but from the list of responses, it seems that the procedure works. A cached copy is also available here in case the page mentioned above goes down.

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Hotmail now offers 250 mb of email storage space. Just checked my hotmail account and yes, it does have 250 mb email space now. When Yahoo mail increased its email space to 100 mb a couple of months back, I had read somewhere that hotmail was also planning to increase it’s email space in August 2004. Two and a half months later, that seems to be a reality.
As for me, I still use my University email account. It offers only 20 mb of space but I use it because it offers IMAP access. Also, it has 6 MX records i.e. basically 6 mail servers handling the incoming email. This means that if one of the email servers go down, the others will pick up the email. Most email providers have only 1 or 2 MX records. Yahoo and Hotmail have 4, Rediffmail has 3 and Gmail has 2 MX records respectively.
POP is good but I like IMAP a lot better and it is much more convenient. I have a gmail account but I seldom use it because it does not provide POP or IMAP access. It would be great if I could have access to an email service with good storage space (200mb+) and which offers IMAP access. I am even willing to pay for it. I have tried the free version of Fastmail and it works pretty good.
Related entries from my blog:
– Rediffmail now offers 1 GB of email space (June 17, 2004 10:35 PM)
– Yahoomail now offers 100 MB of email space (June 15, 2004 06:39 PM)
– Got my Gmail account! (June 12, 2004 01:40 AM)
Correction (6:39 PM 11/13/2004): It seems Gmail does offer POP access now but not to all its users yet. I just checked mine and POP access has not been enabled for my account yet :(. If Gmail starts supporting IMAP, it will be really great!!! :).