Yahoo! Inc. will increase the amount of free storage it provides its email customers, raising the stakes in the email war with rival Google Inc.

Email customers will be upgraded to 100-megabytes of storage, while paying customers will receive 2-gigabytes of space.

Yahoo!, which had offered several different premium email services priced from $29.99 a year for 25 megabytes of storage to $59.99 for 100 megabytes of storage, said it also has moved to a single premium email service priced at $19.99.

"With the new Yahoo! Mail, consumers won't have to think about mailbox size. When they judge Web mail value, they'll continue to look at all the things that make Yahoo! Mail No. 1 – including privacy practices, superior spam and virus protection, and integrated calendaring and alerts."