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The company says it has increased the speed of the counter, which adds more storage to your account the more time you spend in Gmail, and bumped up the amount of free storage.

The company doesn't specify how much extra capacity has been made available, but in our three test Gmail accounts the storage has been increased to 3.2GB, with the counter continually adding extra kilobytes as we type.

Yet, despite the boost, Google's storage

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still falls short of its rival. Microsoft's free Hotmail accounts offer 5GB of storage, while Yahoo claims to offer its customers an unlimited amount of storage.

Google says it's made extra mail storage space available because of customer demand. "In April 2005, we started increasing Gmail storage as part of our 'Infinity+1' storage plan," a post on Google's Gmail blog reads. "At that time, we realised we'd never reach infinity, but we promised to keep giving Gmail users more space as we were able.

"That said, a few of you are using Gmail so much that you're running out of space, so to make good on our promise, today we're announcing we are speeding up our counter and giving out more free storage."

As well as boosting the capacity of the free Gmail accounts, Google has more than doubled the space available to subscribers to its Premier Gmail accounts. They will now receive 25GB, up from the previous limit of 10GB.