Microsoft has given a clear indication that it intends to charge for services online by offering subscribers to its free email service, Hotmail, the option of paying for additional storage space online.
Users of the Hotmail service are currently allocated 2MB of storage space. For the past number of weeks, the Microsoft Network, www.msn.com, has been offering users an additional 8MB of storage at a fee of $12.95 a year.
Hotmail, which was accquired by Microsoft in 1998 for $400 million, is the most popular Web-based email service, with more than 100 million accounts registered worldwide.
In July, the company relaunched the service with enhanced functionality, such as a souped-up spam filter - a move welcomed by most users who regularly found their 2MB allocation consumed by unwanted mail.
The new look Hotmail also has an interface that more closely resembles Microsoft’s other online properties, including MSN and its Explorer browser.
The hugely successful portal Yahoo!, a rival of MSN which offers a Web-based email package, has also made moves to introduce a fee-system.
While the basic mail package offered by Yahoo! is expected to remain free for the foreseeable future, it has already been charging users an extra 25MB of storage space at a cost of $19.99 annually for some time.
Last week it announced the introduction of a business version of its service which will set users back more than $100 annually.
