.Mac bumps up storage capacity, improves mail

Apple has improved the services offered to subscribers of .Mac. Previously, the amount of storage for a basic .Mac account was 100MB, with a maximum of 15MB for e-mail. The service's base online storage has been increased to 250MB, e-mail service has been enhanced, and the cost of upgrading has been reduced. .Mac's basic subscription price remains the same -- US$99.95 per year.

By default, .Mac allocates basic accounts with 125MB of storage for iDisk and another 125MB for e-mail. Subscribers can adjust that ratio under the new Storage Settings feature from .Mac's accounts settings, however. What's more, buying additional storage is much less expensive: Upgrading your iDisk to 1GB of total capacity previously cost US$350 -- now it's $49.95. Additional e-mail only accounts still cost $10 each, and offer 50MB of storage capacity, up from the previous 15MB limit.

.Mac e-mail service has been improved beyond just storage capacity: Users can now have maximum message sizes of 10MB, making it easier to send large file attachments. .Mac e-mail has also added support for account aliases -- useful for online purchasing, newsletter subscriptions or other activities where it's useful to mask your regular e-mail identity -- and an online spell checker and customizable dictionary with support for multiple languages.