Microsoft finally made good on a five months'-old promise Thursday by upping the storage allowance for new members of its Hotmail e-mail service.

In June, Microsoft announced that it was increasing storage space for users of the Web-based Hotmail, a reaction to Google's earlier debut of a beta version of Gmail with 1GB of storage. In July, the Redmond, Wash.-based developer began boosting storage for its paying members, and since then has very gradually rolled out 250MB allotments to its non-paying users.

As of Thursday, new Hotmail customers in the U.S., Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, and the U.K. receive 25MB of storage when they register. Thirty days later, the allowance is automatically upgraded to 250MB.

"We created a storage waiting period to ensure that new accounts are used by qualified customers and are not being generated by spammers or malicious users," said Brian Arbogast, corporate vice president for MSN, in a statement.

Also on Thursday, Hotmail began offering users account addresses with country-specific domain names for the U.K., Germany, France, Italy, and Japan. Rather than the generic @hotmail.com suffix, for instance, users in Germany will be able to obtain an address with @hotmail.de.com.

"The new domains will allow for Hotmail customers in these five markets to more easily find desirable e-mail names within their country," said Arbogast.