Janet Roberts
Raquel Hirsch is one happy Yahoo! Mail Plus customer today, because she and every other paying Mail Plus customer saw email storage capacity shoot up to 2GB, as Yahoo! said it would do over a month ago.

Freebie users also got a boost in storage capacity, from 4MB to 100 MB. Not close to Gmail's vaunted 1GB of space, but enough to keep Yahoo! addresses from turning sour in your database quite as fast due to overcapacity.

"Wow! I never have to delete an email again!" Raquel told us. "Is this a good thing???"

Yahoo is betting that it is with an array of special features that appear geared toward keeping their Mail Plus customers, who paid $20 and up a year for premium service, from fleeing to Gmail.

Other bennies for Mail Plus customers:

-- No more skyscraper ads crowding the inbox. Between the left-hand menu and the right-hand ads, the email got squeezed.

-- A cleaned-up interface that's a little easier to navigate (not that there was any real problem with the old one).

-- One price: $19.99. Previously, Mail Plus users had to pay more to get more storage (50MB and up).

-- Email search (another Gmail benefit).

Mail Plus customers already had more storage and a larger message size than free-mail users. They can send and receive email from any POP3 email address and their outbound messages don't carry the viral Yahoo! ads.

At least one catch has emerged for people who want to sign up for Yahoo!'s expanded free service, though.

Chris Richardson of WebProNews said in an article today that after he signed up for a free account, he could not access his email unless he agreed to install Yahoo!'s companion toolbar.