Microsoft is to open its subscription-based MSN Extra Storage product to the Irish market in a move that will give its Hotmail user base up to 10 times more capacity.
The company decided to expand the availability of MSN Extra Storage to 23 international markets, including Ireland, to meet growing demand for more online storage space, especially among the majority of Hotmail users who rely on the free service as their primary email account.
The MSN Extra Storage service allows subscribers to store five times more email than can be done with a standard Hotmail account and 10 times more photos and files on MSN groups than the standard version.
“The volume and size of documents that people trade online continues to grow as email and personal websites become an even more important communication tool,” said Lisa Gurry, group product manager for MSN. “By making MSN Extra Storage available to more people around the world in their own language, we can help meet this growing customer demand. This furthers our plans to broadly offer customers around the world a variety of high-quality subscription services in the future.”
With the new subscription service, Irish net users can have 10MB of space for Hotmail storage – enough to store approximately 500 more email messages than is possible with a standard free Hotmail account.
In addition, they can have 30MB of storage on MSN Groups – enough to store some 300 more photos than is possible with a standard free Hotmail account. As well as this, users will have the ability to send or receive messages and attachments of up to 3MB, or three times that of a standard free Hotmail account.
Hotmail is one of the most popular websites in the Irish marketplace, with some 423,384 people accessing the free email service.
By John Kennedy
