Yahoo announced Tuesday it was giving users of its web-based e-mail service unlimited storage capacity as a tribute to Yahoo Mail's 10th birthday.

In a phased roll-out beginning in May, Yahoo will eliminate the one-gigabyte cap on memory for people with free e-mail accounts and two-gigabyte cap of memory for those who pay for premium accounts.

Internet search titan Yahoo, based in Sunnyvale, California, bought web-based e-mail service Rocketmail and it had four megabytes of storage when it was relaunched as Yahoo Mail in October of 1997.

Four megabytes of memory would likely not be sufficient to hold a set of pictures taken during the course of a festive weekend by someone with a typical digital camera.

Yahoo Mail is the most popular web-based e-mail service and had more than 250 million users as of January, according to industry-tracking comScore Media Metrix.

Yahoo said its "e-mail server farms" around the globe were equipped to handle the storage load and the company will invest in improved capacity where necessary.

The limitless storage is not meant to be used by people to back-up computer software by copying system contents onto Yahoo servers.

"It was intended for normal e-mail practices," Kremer said. "Our engineers built the technologies to understand what types of files are being sent and where."

Rival Google is currently offering a free email service called Gmail. The service offers more than 2.5GB of storage, while Microsoft's and Windows Live Hotmail offers 2GB for free.