Google adds features to corporate e-mail

Google Inc. is sprucing up its corporate e-mail service by adding security tools and more than doubling the storage capacity of e-mail boxes, underscoring the online search leader’s ambition to enlarge its role in the business software market.

The changes, to be unveiled today, mark Google’s first attempt to capitalize on the technology that it picked up in its recently completed $625-million acquisition of e-mail security specialist Postini Inc.

Google also is courting Postini’s existing customers as it tries to drum up more interest in a suite of online software applications that costs each user $50 annually. The roughly 36,000 businesses already using Postini products can get the software bundle, which includes word processing, spreadsheet and other programs, free through June.

To make its corporate e-mail product more enticing, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company is boosting individual e-mail storage to 25 gigabytes, up from 10 gigabytes.

After the free trial expires, Google hopes to retain many of those businesses, which include more than 11 million individual users, as customers.