One of the major highlights of GMail's web-based mailing system was the massive amount of storage space available to each user, with the likes of Hotmail and other competing services struggling to compete.

Well that has now changed as Microsoft have raised the limit of their Hotmail service from what was previously 2GB up to a staggering 5GB!

Details here.

More than twice the storage isn't the only thing new for Hotmail users. As noted by Hotmail program manager Ellie Powers-Boyle's blog, the webmail should now respond to user commands faster. "We've spent more time in this release identifying what parts of the product are slowest and fixing those. We hope that you notice an improvement when this update is released to your account, and we'll continue our work on performance in future releases," Powers-Boyle wrote.

Hotmail users with multiple contact entries for the same person will find that the new version will have consolidated all duplicates into one. Powers-Boyle gives the example, "If you get a message from 'Steve Kafka' and click "add contact" but there's already a Steve Kafka, we'll let you know and let you add Steve's other e-mail address to your existing 'Steve Kafka' contact entry. We're just trying to be smarter to make your life easier and faster. There's also a wizard you can run to clean up your existing duplicate contacts."