Google has given the storage counter for Gmail a little boost to its spin, but believe it or not they could be doing more.

Gmail Storage Ticks Upward, Lags Yahoo, AOL

Not very long ago, storage on web-based email measured in the megabytes, and not very many of them, either. When Gmail arrived with its 1GB inbox, invites to the service became a hot commodity.

Google’s decision to take advantage of what has become an inexpensive commodity, storage, spurred interest and gave the company another place to drop its signature contextual advertising. As of market close on October 11, Google’s $622 share price gave it a market cap of over $194 billion.

We can’t tie that directly to Gmail, of course, but Gmail likely didn’t get in the way of that rise, either. Google plans to give a little back to the Gmail users in the form of more storage:

In April 2005, we started increasing Gmail storage as part of our “Infinity+1″ storage plan. At that time, we realized we’d never reach infinity, but we promised to keep giving Gmail users more space as we were able. That said, a few of you are using Gmail so much that you’re running out of space, so to make good on our promise, today we’re announcing we are speeding up our counter and giving out more free storage.

In Google Apps, Gmail accounts start at 2GB, except for Premier Edition accounts, which begin at 10 GB. Now, the 2GB accounts will receive their own spinning counter, while the 10GB accounts receive a nudge to 25GB of storage.

Nice numbers, and for someone who used to have to obey a 20MB email limit in the corporate world, they are huge. But when it comes to truly fantastic amounts of email storage, one has to look at Yahoo Mail and AOL Mail.

Both of these Gmail competitors have millions of users, and unlimited storage for their free webmail accounts. If storage is really an issue for email, Gmail is at best the third choice for people today. Tomorrow, who knows?