Microsoft turns up the heat on Hotmail users

Microsoft has announced its latest measure aimed at encouraging users to pay for their Hotmail accounts, by forcing them to pay for forwarding.

Users of the popular email service provided by MSN can currently collect mail from other accounts by getting it forwarded to their Hotmail account. However, from 16 July they will have to upgrade to the $19.95 per year premium version of the service in order to continue taking advantage of this facility.

The subscription service also buys 10Mb of extra storage space, allowing users to save more emails and receive larger attachments.

This is unlikely to be MSN's last attempt to encourage its 110 million Hotmail customers to start paying for the web-based email service.

Since the introduction of the premium version of the service, customers who exceed the limited storage capacity on the free Hotmail service can find incoming messages being returned to sender and saved messages being unexpectedly deleted.

Rivals such as Yahoo! have also started charging for some of the more advanced features of their web-based email services, as they struggle to generate revenues in a weak online advertising market.