The battle for control of free e-mail accounts on the web has entered a crucial phase with the launch of a much-lauded service by one of the "big-four" providers.

A new generation of "freemail" is vying to entice loyal users with a slew of updated features, including storage for a lifetime's worth of digital messages, that aim to bridge the gap between web-based e-mail and mobile phones.

Yahoo! upped the ante this week with a revamped service that was lauded by Walter Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal, the doyen of gadget reviewers, as the best out of the current crop provided by the "big four"- a group that also includes Google's Gmail, Microsoft's Hotmail and AOL.

Crucially, Yahoo!'s new offering can be accessed through an internet browser and mobiles by allowing users to send text messages from computers to phone handsets - free of charge.

The feature works on certain phones in the US, Canada, India and Portugal, for the time being, but Yahoo! is looking at rolling it out in other territories. The company believes that in the coming years, more people will access the web through mobile phones than computers.

George Hadjigeorgiou, head of e-mail for Yahoo! in Europe, said: "We are focused on making it easy for people to connect to those who matter most to them."

Other recent innovations from rival companies include Google Gears, a piece of free software that allows users to operate web-based tools, such as e-mail, even when they do not have an internet connection.

Yahoo! Mail also offers "unlimited" storage for e-mails and attachments, beating the 2.9GB offered by Google's free version of Gmail and Hotmail, which is boosting its free storage capacity to 5GB. The Yahoo! service also includes an instant messaging tool (for those times when an e-mail is too slow), which can also be used to talk to users of Microsoft's IM service.

The combination of the Yahoo! and Microsoft instant messaging (IM) systems creates a communications platform with some 350 million user accounts. There are plans to extend the alliance to internet telephony using VoIP (voice over internet protocol) technology. Such a joint platform would eclipse the 100 million user base of Skype, the leading internet telephony company and the 19 million user accounts boasted by BT.

More than 20 million Britons visited a non-work e-mail website last month, according to Nielsen//NetRatings, the market researcher. The vast majority of those accounts are provided free, their suppliers willing to subsidise them - at a cost of hundreds of millions - because of the route their provide to potential revenues from sales of advertising, goods and services.

Moreover, while users of social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo skip from one site to the next and are regarded as "chronically unfaithful" by internet executives, e-mail users are still regarded as relatively loyal in comparison - habitually returning to the same sites.

"E-mail websites are pretty sticky," Mary Beth Kemp, a senior analyst for Forrester, the technology consultants, said. "They are a good way of reaching consumers, nine out of ten web users use e-mail - and of selling advertising."

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