Slashdot Mirror
Gmail Users Get A Storage Boost [updated]
Faies writes "As reported by ZDNet: Not to be outdone by Lycos, Google just upped its 1,000 megabyte accounts to 1,000,000 MB. I just recently checked my inbox, and the number at the bottom confirms this. "You are currently using 12 MB (0%) of your 1000000 MB." That's more than my hard drive...and plus, Google clearly wants to hold the title of being best, so who knows what will happen if someone else tries to compete with a terabyte." Now how much would you pay? Update: 05/19 13:34 GMT by T : Several comments to this thread indicate that the listed mailbox size limit has returned to the previous 1GB level, so this apparent change may be nothing more than the result of a misplaced decimal point.
Looks like just one more reason to get top dollar when I auction my account ;)
mwahahahaha!!!
Whats the largest size mail you can send/receive with GMail?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Honestly, what use does one have for such a large mailbox? I'm afraid to think what will happen if this would go live without too much restrictions. The warez guys would be all over this. Then it will be cut & cut until it's basically useless (look at what say geocities have had to do to curb piracy). Still, i'd like to get an account when it goes live (and any storage above say, 1G isn't useful to me.)
Will wank off Linus Torvalds for fame.
what the different between 1000MB and 10000000000MB
I hope that is a typo, delivering 1TB of Email is plain crazy. Counting all the spam i ever received, and all the legit mail i dont even think i come close to 1TB. Thats like - a Life time of Mail (TM)
:)
I think google has more servers than they tould us, or a very good compression algorithm
Sounds like employee's get 1 Tb and their might have been a mix up and regualr people where giving this much. Some that reported haveing 1 Tb are now reporting to be back down to 1 Gb. Fun while it lasted I guess :/
GeekLeak.com - Silly name, serious geeks
I actually kinda look forward to having the ability to get such a service. I don't know about most of you, but I'm an email pack rat. Something like this would definately come in handy, but the only problem I could see with it is what if someone hacked my account and read all of my emails. Do they have the ability to back up your inbox to your harddrive for a seperate soft copy? I wasn't one of the ones lucky enough to get the Beta Test.
my mouth is open but theres no sound. just proves that its not only in space that no one can hear you scream...
1000000megs.. I wonder what age I'll be when I have that much storage space on my computer.
I recently got my entire hard drive wiped out when I messed up a Debian install. Some of my recent important documents were saved on my email account, but the old ones got lost.
This is great news from Google. If I had a terabyte of storage accessible from anywhere I'd hardly use my harddrive at all.
Has Google published APIs to GMail yet? I'd love to rewire OpenOffice's save function through Evolution so it stores it right on my GMail address.
Thank you for your support.
Attachments are limited to 100kb.
Kidding...
But they are obviously joking. They'll likely just assign a team to target the top 5 percent of users who use the most space. My whole mail file from the past year is under a gig because people simply can't send large attachments from most accounts.
Anyone know what the email attachment size limit is?
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
gmail filesystem anyone?
/dev/gmailfs /home
dump 0f
That's one hell of a lot of spam storage!!
Seriously though, you do have to wonder how much spam google with end up storing.
Same s**t, different day
...that this is turning into a ridiculous 'my ____ is bigger than your ____' contest? I mean, good GOD: a TB of EMAIL space? What kind of gi-normous HDD farm do they have for all this to back it up? What kind of trick they have to do this, I wonder.
Nobody's ever going to fill such an account, at least with small-sized emails.
They could just claim 'unlimited space' accounts.
That would prevent kiddies from wanting to be the one with the biggest account, and from filling them with garbage on purpose.
with that must space one must wonder where all the funding comes from. that must be a huge cost. i think google is either going public really soon or they have discovered some magic hard drive that they're going to release when they go public.
If they keep buying those huge sums of harddisks for their racks they might as well be a way to get cheaper harddisks. ;-)
Time to uuencode my disk images and backup to Gmail!
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
They can easily do this, because 99.9999999999% of their users will never have more than, say, 1 MB of mail anyway.
:)
Even if you are reading several mailinglists you don't easily get over 1 GB of mail. Even my 2-3 year Bugtraq archive is just ~130 MB in size.
But still, the "cool" factor is what counts, obviously
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
Is this not for all users then?
Alright, so I've always liked Google and all, but doesn't this seem a little odd? How are they going to maintain one terabyte storage for people?
But then again, how long would it take the average user (or even the above average attachment-loving) to fill up an email account of one terabyte? I'm having trouble filling my 240 GB in my computer as it is (well, having trouble because I stick to legal media)
If a free service provides you with more storage space than your physical computer, your incentive to buy a large hard-drive will diminish (for a typical (non-porn hording) user). Maybe we will notice a drop in price/gb because of this?
Jon Bardin
Nobody really expects a terrabyte of storage do they?
I think they may run into problems with the storage when people start emailing themselves huge compressed files in order to store them online. I recall reading that gmail doesnt give you 1Gb or 1Tb of disk space, but compresses your data so it feels like you have that much disk space, and because text compresses rather well, you can stick 1Gb of text into a relitively tiny space. Now compressed files, on the other hand, cant be compressed farther, and will most likely fill up your quota really quickly. I can just hear people bitching and complaining when they send one 20 meg zip file and have gmail tell them they are out of storage space :P
...it's just the binary representation of the size of your inbox
This is just getting crazy. I've saved every e-mail since 11/02 on my harddrive and it only uses about 150megs.
I submitted a related story last night that was rejected. Here's a copy of what I submitted in my Journal. Check out the links in the submission:
Gmail competition heats up
Despite what they all say, Google clearly is showing that size does matter.
This is like a bad Pr0n flick where the next guy who comes in is bigger than the first, and you just go..'no way....'
Eat that Lycos!!
However, I can't help but think that this is a mistake. Providing a terabyte of storage space per user is not only pointless, it's pretty much impossible.
ok, this was probably the most confused and useless post I ever made here. Time for a day off. Just dont even try to get my point, it could cause serious braindamage. ;-)
That should just about cover my spam...
Gmail, here I come!
If you follow the links in the article to the blog pages who first reported it, you will see that everyone's limit has went back to 1GB.
b yte-1000-gb-of-gmail-storage
Remember its still in testing, i think this was a one off bug.
www.intelliot.com/blog/archives/2004/05/18/1-tera
For the price they want, I could still run my own server. It costs probably 100 a year for a server that can hold easily more than One Gigabyte in email\storage. There is no practical use for the account anyway that there isn't already a cheaper solution for.
The only reason anyone needs this sort of capacity is if they're sending huge attahments about and haven't got the sense to delete them from time to time.
email is one of the worst file transfer mechanisms around.
I'd far prefer a gig or so of FTP or HTTP space, that I can link to by email. Sadly, nobody realises that you can do this.
Hi:
Finally, unlimited mail. I can't wait for that day in the future when technology will finally permit us to run mail clients off our local systems.
Gotta wonder, though. Does the average user think Yahoo and Hotmail are "real" and your own client running locally "bad" because you can't access it unless it's running.
I've got mail going back decades which are fun to go through on occasion. So many people (marketing f***wits actually) delete mail (to their regret when they found out I have not!
Just rambling
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
How hard do you think it would be to write a script that emails files from your system to your gmail account is a sort of backup scheme. If the Subject : line included the date the message was sent I could keep multiple full backups in my free gmail account. Shouldn't be hard to base64 encode and email my $HOME to myself. Let's see my $HOME is $20G so I can keep ~50 full backups in my gmail account.
:-)
And since they support IMAP I can restore from backup with another script... I think I've got another little Perl hack coming on
John.
I know how expensive storage is. I'm buying a $50,000 SAN that holds 500Gigs of storage. To back that up I use a $30,000 tape library. How can google do this and not go out of business?
Does this mean it will be called tmail now?
With all the use of E-Mails in court cases, is it really wise to have this much E-Mail space? I mean, if you store everything out there and keep it. Won't it come back to haunt you. I mean the old saying goes "Everybody has at least one novel in them." But this is ridiculous.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
But why not make the quota a whole terrabyte?
M.
--
Numismatica
While I haven't seen additional confirmation either way, Mike Masnick at Techdirt checked with a friend at Google who stated the the apparent increase to 1TB was a mistake, not a storage upgrade.
* * *
It is a dada story -- it has no moral.
I wanted to get my firstnamelastname@gmail.com, my names are very generic and would have been taken. I bought the other two for my wife and daughter. In hindsight, I probably didnt need to buy it, but the 75$ would have gone to something stupid like food or fuel anyway.
-- ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space!
If this is the case. Seriously, what is someone going to do with 1GB of mail, let alone 1TB.
I still say that this service is basicially wasting space. It could be so much better used in some sort of Remote storage solution like XDrive.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
Yes. They can READ them. Not just let a harvestor search for keywords in it. They can read them. Word for word, cause I don't care if they do, when I 1 TB webspace for free.
Read my lips and my emails. I love you Google!
(ok, can I get my gmail 1 TB account now?)
Well... I don't think that I'll ever collect 1TB of data, but it's good that I know I could.
If I take all the data from all my computers, it's not even close to a TB. And of course if I only count the space used for email, it's only a tiny tiny tiny fraction of a TB. So I wonder, why would you need this (except for file-sharing/warez of course)?
It would be of interest to know how they are modelling the storage usage. Not many persons will ever fill up 1 TB, I would need 5 months with constant maximum uploading from my machine to fill that. So how safe is it to promise that space?
I guess they could promise you 1000000000 TB also, as no one except me would ever try to fill that up.
Evolution of Language Through The Ages: 6000 BC : ungh, grrf, booga 2000 AD : grep, awk, sed
If they ever get around to offering a googol of bytes for your mailbox, then maybe someone will have a reason to sue!
My account says 1000MB. It may have been a bug, as the service is still in beta.
The one thing that I HATE about Tech these days.. is that I have to delete some data..
IF this is true.. you just made an old geeks dreams come true.. (wet ones at that)
I for one welcome our new Google overlords.
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
Script kiddies
Not long after I submitted this article, my account (and those of 4 others I know) reverted back to 1,000 MB. Since the article does mention that Google had no official comment, it's quite possible that this was all a fluke. I had observed the changes earlier in the evening, but waited to see if there was official confirmation from a large new source (i.e. ZDnet) before thinking this was for reals. As it turns out, it may not have been so.
For reference, my friends and I noticed the size reductions around 1:45 AM PST. They did not occur all at once; mine was one of the last ones to get set to 1,000 MB. Another small detail is that not all gmail accounts I knew of got set to a terabyte- there was one user who was feeling quite left out in the gigabyte pool.
Even though everybody seems to be talking about Lycos offering 1GB, I've seen very few people mention that Lycos' offer is not free.
To get the 1GB account you will need to cough up 3.49GBP a month.
Still a good offer though, if you don't have the option of running your own server, but definately not as good as Google's free version.
In God We Trust, Others We Monitor
When I read the
Work on your statistics, guy. By those numbers everyone on earth could have an account, and none of them would be over 1MB.
Of course, nit-picks aside, I agree with your point. The reason they can offer so much storage is that virtually on one will use it. Note the 10MB limit per email.
Well, let's see. Assuming 1.544Mb T-1 is available for use 24/7 and it's dedicated to sending 1mb attachments at a time (and you can send 1,000,000 of those). Figure about 60 megabytes an hour (or 60 messages an hour) it would take 16,667 hours or 694 days.
Google has nothing to worry about by offering 1tb of storage. They have two years to get it online...
Just add {In Space!} to anything.
And that's all there's to it.
Besides, look at it as you'd look at overselling airplane seats, or dial-up capacity: It's pretty certain not will all be claimed at the same time, and you're pretty certain to get away with it. They could have added 3 more zeroes to that quota, and it wouldn'nt make the slightest difference.
Wake me up when we get one petabyte storage for free.
Nothing. Why would I want to pay for a poor answer to a sovled problem? I have storage for my email; it's called a hard drive. I can already search through my past emails; it's called grep, sometimes even find. I don't get why everyone's so excited over google's solution to something that people have had figured out for twenty years.
Not everything belongs on the web. Email is one of those things.
What can you do with that much email space. Loose every important message you ever get.
All those people who save forwars will use Gmail.
Evolution or ID?
they have those. It's called a shell account. ninjaskills.org has a good service like this, but I think you only get like 10 MB.
Help! I'm being repressed!
as Slashdot has said before, the LaCie BiggerDisk is a device with 1 TB of storage. You can buy it for $1100.
Hey, multiply that by the number of GMail accounts, and divide by the number of shares in Google... and you might get something close to Google's IPO price! Im a genius!
You are currently using 0 MB (0%) of your 1000 MB. I hope a gig is enough e-mail storage space. At least it would take longer for someone to spam me to death if I had a TB of storage. Other than that, I can not fathom the need for that much storage. It would become a de facto NAS for many users.
I hate sigs.
That sounds a little like the Yahoo Briefcase, except in this case they can't grant access to the public. However, they wouldn't even have to do that. The 'distributors' can simply send the files to their GMail account, tell others to create new accounts and send files to them (which is basically a matter of copying files on local server, isn't it?).
Google, like many free webmail services, are looking to get (almost) as many users as they can. They know that G-mail will get a lot of attention from everyone (even people like me who rarely use webmail because IMAP & Exchange is so much better). Even if I don't use it, the fact that I'm paying attention to it means I'll probably recommend it to others (mostly people who don't use e-mail a whole lot and don't know what IMAP or Exchange is). And these are the kind of people who are going to have mailboxes that are
Hmm... makes you wonder if they just cite the uncompressed plain text capability. Maybe they use heavy compression on the mail text and the clever bit is the fast search algorithms on the compressed mailboxes (mailboxen?).
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
This is correct:
1024bytes = 1kilobyte
1024kilobytes = 1megabyte
1024megabytes = 1gigabyte
1024gigabytes = 1terabyte
1,099,511,627,776bytes = 1terabyte
The following is patently incorrect, and originated as false advertising among hard drive producers:
1000bytes = 1kilobyte
1000kilobytes = 1megabyte
1000megabytes = 1gigabyte
1000gigabytes = 1terabyte
It is now starting to catch on among those who should know better.
Off site back up of your hard disks by e-mailing segmented archives at attachments to your gmail account. Encrypted of course.
...to offer a googol bytes of e-mail storage!
Three words that coud be there at next James Bond movie title.
Yes, but you can't really find free 1gig FTP accounts, it's hard enough (if not impossible) to find free 1gig web accounts.
I'm pretty sure someone will come up with a script that splits large files to 10mb chunks and sends them to a Gmail account.
A possible, but expensive, way to fight this is to routinely scan stored attachments for sequential names, e.g. GTA3_0.rar, GTA3_1.rar and flag them for admin review if the total is 200mb or over.
Now I can finally keep at least half of all my porn spam!
... It appears that Google is offering an upgrade to their User Interface!
This is Incredible! I've never seen anything like it! How are they doing this!? It's seems so convincing and life-like!!
(walking head-first into large, heavy object)
Oops! Sorry. It seems to be a real tree.
Years later, a doctor will tell me that I have an I.Q. of 48, and am what some people call "mentally retarded".
"Fuck Everything, We're Going to Five Blades!" -from a recent Op-Ed in The Onion from the CEO of Gilette
This is the NFL, which stands for "Not For Long" if you keep making those bulls*** calls.
Well...
I'd love to see each of their subscribers try and fill up their allocated space. I wonder at what point GMails disks would actually be full? I bet theres not more than a few TB for the whole user base. They are just hoping that no one actually has that much mail.
If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done?
but I'm really uncomfortable with some of the social implications of GMail's services (along with some of the other services)
1) It seems like this promotes a tendency to centrally store all e-mail forever. No potential for any abuse by anyone there, right?
2) 10MB attachments. Uggh! Here I've spent years training my users to only send smaller files via e-mail. Maybe I'm out of touch with the times but I hate to think of the effect on bandwidth as people get accustomed to sending 10MB files through e-mail. To everyone on their address list. How long before GMail allows 25MB attachments in response to Lycos offering 15MB attachments?
Which is about as fast as typical users have for upstream bandwidth these days, that would basically be one year of constant uninterrupted sending. My quick calculation is 361.7 days.
So, if they cap your inbox recieve at 256K and make you clean it out once a year then they could just call this unlimited use.
As informative :)
http://mediagoblin.org/
I don't know but it wouldn't surprise me if, in the future, you have to pay to get a 20 meg attachment limit and the free version is only 1 meg.
Still would be usable for most people, but if you want really big attachments, then you have to pay.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
you will NEVER EVER have to delete email, even if you use it for 80 years.
640KB RAM should be enough for anyone.
Everyone is talking about how to use Gmail for file storage. Here are the facts:
10MB ATTACHMENT file storage limit.
First off -- nothing is said about not having multiple attachments per email. This is a "Good Thing"(tm)
As far as I'm concerned, that fact alone makes it very viable to be used for quite a few purposes:
1. The gmail filesystem
Have a system setup where a UNIQUE Identifier as the Subject maps to a Directory Value map (stored on your local system) -- now all you need is this small file, and you have access to a terabyte of storage. Each email can then store the Files for that directory (also as unique ID #'d file attachments) -- each file could be stored as a 10MB split volume size compressed/ENCRYPTED rar
-- the encrypted now eliminates privacy concerns
1a. Now that you have a filesystem on a remote machine here are your limitations/advantages:
* Any file you access over 10MB will be slower, because it will have to reconstruct from multiple rars
* Any file modification, and initial uploading of files will be painful -- most of us have asyncronous internet connections.
* Imagine how fast you can now send people ANYTHING -- just FORWARD the email thats sitting around -- most likely won't even cause google to use more storage
2. -- this last point also brings us back to what someone said about warez kiddies.
If anyone remembers the warez kiddy days back in AOL -- they used huge pools of forwarded emails to send warez around -- AOL only had a few MB limit, and no multiple attachments per email IIRC.
Now, people could email you Office 2003, 3GB in 10 sec. -- could get a little hairy
May this post be indexed by spiders, and archived for all to see as my Internet epitaph.
Bwahhhaaha ! Awesome.
Face it James Bond. You like Gadgets. You like hot girls. You like explosions. You're a nerd. Welcome to the club!
GFS: How about a GMail Files System? I am not a programmer and don't geek down to that level, but it sounds plausible. Break your file system into say 256KB (encrypted) binary attachments with distinct subject lines for locating the the right message when you need it. You now have a huge store of email acting as the allocation units for a file system.
GFS RAID: Google is not the only one offering huge email stores. Get more than one of the huge accounts from Google or SpyMac and you have the equivelent of multiple HDDs. If you call each of those allocation emails a "stripe" and spread them across two or three different stores, you have a GMail RAID-1 or RAID-5 set.
This sounds like it would be easy to simulate and run on a local mail server, then simply point to your GMail/SpyMac/Whatever accounts bring online. High latency and low bandwidth, yes, but very distributed. Maybe good for remote backups.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
Lucky man ! So you don't have a whole population of parasits at work, spending most of their time forwarding (and even designing for the brightest ones) unfunny powerpoint documents to their whole addressbook ?
Or perhaps you are The True Geek and have no friends. I feel your pain buddy.
And I'm still at 1,000 MB.
I'm not sure that this is an appropriate marketing response to Lycos and others. Past a certain point, the numbers become effectively meaningless for users, meaning nothing other than "a whole lot of storage space". I would concentrate on searchability and that patented, slick Google interface.
And I would add the other things that Yahoo has, like a complete address book (currently it only accepts email addresses). Calendaring would be nice, too.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
How will Google deal with the massive amount of bandwidth that they must need for this? I bet they'll be deleting all of the unused accounts, just so those unused accounts dont suck up bandwitdh.
Shouldn't it say: "You are currently using 12 MB (0%) of your 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0 MB".
...*MY* GMail has a billion kagillion MB's! At that size, who really cares?
The real reason for this much email space is for the next version of Office - so that users can attach a Word document.
I for one welcome our new [insert main topic] overlords.
Now lets try and fill that with a 2Mb attachment limit :P
GPLv2: I want my rights, I want my phone call! DRM: What use is a phone call, if you are unable to speak?
I just logged into my Gmail and I still have only 1000 mb.
A few people have made the comment that Google can do this because 99% of the people will only use a few MBs of storage anyway. Reasonable theory, but here's another idea -- it doesn't matter if everyone uses a massive amount of storage.
First, figure out how many people there are in the world that might potentially use Gmail. Then figure out what is the potential maximum amount of unique data each of those people could generate on a daily basis. Then determine the size of the redundant information that could pass through the Gmail servers.
Note that a huge percentage of emails and attachments are sent to multiple recipients. For each piece of email or attachment compute and store a unique hash. Each account consists of only a list of hashes and some header metadata. This redundant information will significantly reduce the total storage space.
A quick seach finds this Berkeley study that suggests that there were about 400 PB of email (unique) generated last year. Assuming that you can save 1 GB of data for the fully-loaded cost of $1 (US), storing all of the internet's annual email traffic costs $500M annually in the worst case.
The best case is significantly better than that, as you can:
a) compress text by up to 80%
b) store every mail only once
c) store every large binary only once
d) add storage as needed, not up-front
e) reduce the cost of storage over time
This is off-the-cuff, but Google is looking at maybe a $50M annual investment in storage to store all the email on the internet, even if everyone uses it. They don't even need a storage limit. Period.
Personal improvement that is. With 1TB of mail, would I start with adding up to 3 inches, or get a comp. sci. degree for only $1.99?
This is something I like to call the bubble gum principle:
When I was in middle school, chewing gum in class or at school was against the rules, but yet everyone tried to get away withit, we practically had a bubble gum mafia.
But when I got to high school, they changed the rules that you could chew gum. All of a sudden, there were a lot less people chewing gum.
I know that this principle works in regards to quotas because on suso.org, I have absolutely no quotas, and don't have a problem with users getting out of hand with their disk space. Sure there are a few that use several GBs, but most of them don't and like the fact that it's unlimited.
I wouldn't like that idea much unless I had more of a LAN speed net connection... even with standard broadband (heck most broadband due to the limited upload speed) it would take a fair while to save the data.
Imagine your OpenOffice doc had loads of images and was about 10 megs, add any autobackup feature say every 10 mins... wouldn't your upload connection be maxed out (and to hell with your downstream rates).
I do see where you are coming from and I like the idea, but whenever you get a major boost to your storage capacity or net speed... you'll always find ways of maxing it out.
Just my 0.02 pence
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
it would take me almost a year of receiving email (24x7) or 2.5 year of sending email to reach 1 Tb.
Net sa best, mar it koe minder
As soon as google goes public and has several buhzillion dollars *free money* handed to them, they would theoretically be in a postion to own their own hardware production facilities. They could have their own server, ram, chip, harddrive facilities. Heck, they might be able to start owning chunks of the fat pipes all over for that matter.
they would then be known as GOOGZILLA!
This move to offer TB worth of storage just helps them get investor mindshare, make more loot when they go public.
Ta heck with "desktop" dominance and monopoly, they could conceivably become an "internet" monopoly.
What's it worth to "own" the information on the internet to a big degree, and to be able to access it and index it faster than anyone? What's it worth to private business and to various governments, what would they pay for that information?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
For anyone interested in trying out Gmail for themselves:
Gmail Swap
Basically you post up what you're willing to trade for an account and if someone's interested you're set. Current notable items include a monkey, an iPod, cigars and many other much weirder things.
------
Objects in Mirror are Losing!
After reading the article, my account went upto one 1,000,000MB (at the bottom of the gmail screen). I sent a couple emails, and then it went back down to 1,000MB.. Anyone else see theirs revert back to 1,000MB? Chris.
I've got a Gmail account (no, I won't give an invite :p) and I recently came up with the idea of forwarding all my mail from another account with a simple .procmailrc file straight to my Gmail account. I actually find Google's web interface easier and quicker to use than, say, Thunderbird, and I don't have to worry about the account ever filling up. I won't even go into the hapless users stuck on Outlook.
Anyway, especially since I've dipped my toes into the 419 world recently, a Gmail account with a TB of storage would be the perfect account to run scam-baiting, or general spam collecting, which can have a variety of purposes -- not the least of which is to refine Bayesian filtering. I know there's a place somewhere that encourages you to submit spam, I'm too lazy to look now though. I rememebr ute@ftc.gov as being one place you can forward spam too.
http://cltracker.net -- powerful craigslist multi-city search
I can't wait to forward all the spam that accumulates at my ISP account....
I remember checking it a while ago and even with their spam guard I still had close to 20MB of spam that slipped through.
I figure that if you search for Viagra in google the first link will be to my Gmail account.
Whether it be 1GB or 1TB, I think either way this is going to go the way of "unlimited internet access". A great idea to lure in customers, but eventually reality sets in, capacity problems arise, and the fine print is tweaked to the point where "1GB" doesn't really mean 1GB anymore.
Users, given the option to be lazy, will be lazy. The system can only sustain people never deleting email (plus the inevitable abuse) for so long.
1000000megs.. I wonder what age I'll be when I have that much storage space on my computer.
...roughly 2x250GB drives away. Which is quite affordable today, if that's what I wanted to spend my money on. So far, in my 25 years of age I've passed the MB limit (going from C64 tape/720k floppy to PC), the GB limit (400+800MB drive=1GB+ woot!) and will very soon pass the TB limit. Any takers as to when I'll pass the PB limit? :-D
Or more likely, at that time Internet will be fast enough to serve the same purpose as a HDD. It might not be fast enough for the latest FPS game, but streaming HDTV like you do MP3s today? It'll happen... At which point, I'm not sure PBs would be enough to measure it. What's next?
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Just thought I'd let everyone know.
I don't know if anybody noticed this...
But coinciding with Gmail's announcement a while ago, Yahoo! suddenly stopped counting emails in the Bulk and Trash folders to your quota. I find myself suddenly with over 60% of my mailbox empty.
Any news on Hotmail's quota?
...the ONE professor in Germany that decided to mailbomb everyone sent out 30mb of files all by himself. My throw-away yahoo-account filled up with 6mb of Qt-interest mailing list stuff in no time.
Not to mention all the people that'd *start* sending me huge junk because they could. "Hey, listen to this cool mp3" [Attached file: 5mb].
And all the "Here are all the digicam pics from our holiday" [Attached: 50 files * 2mb] and so on. Probably every crappy pic, not just the highlights either.
Today I'd go "WTF! Stop filling my inbox, others can't send mail to me". With this service, "Ah cool!". I think GMail is going to have a serious problem soon as people get used to this...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I'm still showing a terabyte, even after logins/outs.
Just a friendly fyi.
Late last night someone at Google decided to make Bill Gates squirt hot coffee out of his nose when reading the news this morning.
<emily latella>
Never mind.
</emily latella>
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Even if you assume they just added the HDD's to Google's extensive server farm (which as of yet is using RAM as a primary storage medium) There are quite a few costs you are missing. Such as...
Additional Bandwidth,
Additional electricity,
Additional server technicians,
An army of customer support personnel,
Additional Lawyers,
Additional Salespeople,
Additional physical storage for spare HDD's,
I would guess that these costs will far outstrip the $1 per GB cost of a Hard Drive.
Furthermore, data exapands to fill all available space... not through some trick of programming but because of how people use applications when limits are removed. Expect to see people's habits change when they realize their friends also have a 10 MB per-message transfer limit. Want that MP3? Sure, why not.
Finally, there will be the applications / abuses that hook into Gmail's storage space, which they will have to swat down. I could easily see groups of friendly music lovers automatically synchronizing their collections through Gmail, for example.
In other words, give Google some credit here. They are trying something original that could potentially blow up in their face, however jaded we may have become.
The ______ Agenda
First it was the Initech accounting scam, now Google and GMail.
When will the smooth gangsta realize that messing up some mundane detail always results in catastrophic failure?
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
Typical Slashdot. Ignore the obvious.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
GMail offering 1GB for free is nice, and with ignorable ads, I'm tempted to switch to them, obviously. Right now I'm a paying Yahoo Mail customer, and I look at the prices they charge even now.. 100MB for $59.99.. So Yahoo claims they'll offer 100MB for free and "virtually unlimited" for paying customers. Well, a big reason I went for Yahoo is because I have a highly configured personalized Yahoo homepage and wanted to integrate my mail smoothly into it. However, if anyone's tried putting the "Yahoo Mail Preview" into their Yahoo home page, they'll be dismayed to learn that it usually does not display correctly, and "times out" or whatever.
So I ended up removing it from my homepage, and now Yahoo's on equal footing again. Paying for ad free email is worth it, and the address guard service is nice (disposable email addresses), but Yahoo will sure look bad offering only one tenth the storage of what the competition offers. Yahoo claims they're not going to take it sitting down though, so I'm looking forward to seeing capitalism give me a nice deal from one of them.
Way to fact-check, there, guys.
Hey, if its offered, who cares how its used...
Its the same amount of space if its a 500mb ISO image of a ripped application, or if its 500mb of vacation images sent to gramma..
So whats the difference..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
and yet your realization of this fact is insightful!
free karma anyone?
=]
-ashot
Don't Google have some weird T&C that means they can claim ownership of anything in your email account anyway? So really they are justing providing more space to leave them nice things to own.
they should have named it "from the Oh a big story...oh wait, just a misprint" department.
I've got 12 Terabytes of disk space and it's very nifty.
Granted it cost more than a very large house in the hamptons, but corporations are good for stuff like that...
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
So, I've had a gmail account for a while now and decided to try to get people to fill it up by posting it all over my website and in the comments here at /. and a few other places. So far, only 180MBs have been filled, most of it by people responding to my request to spam me and the rest from actual spam bots who grabbed the info from where I posted the email, like here: cksampleiii@gmail.com. Please feel free to send as many attachments as you can handle to this address and let's see if we can get my original experiment to its original projected limit 1GB, even though it is now listing as 1TB. My other gmail account (which I haven't publicized at all) is still only at 1GB.
Things that I've learned so far: the spam filter in Gmail is sporadic. Of course, this is probably b/c I haven't bothered to train it at all, but nevertheless, it seems to only catch the most widely known spam, while at other times it will suddenly start reporting messages from a source that have gotten through before as spam, which is odd, and as far as I can tell, via no discernible methodology. Some people have sent me over 100 emails with pron porn xxx in the subject and body with no blocking whatsoever, whereas other people have been sending me very innocent messages with large attachments and the first 10 get through and the rest get blocked (although this doesn't happen across the board / consistently).
Also, Gmail says it supports 10MB attachments, but it would seem to mean that the email itself + attachment has to register at under 10MB as I've had a few 9.7MB files that have failed to send.
Otherwise pretty good webmail implementation.
http://www.sampletheweb.com
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What can I say, I get a LOT of spams daily (> 1000 msgs) only 1 or 2 are legit. Even with HIGH spam filtering on my Hotmail account, I still have to delete half my account every day. I'm starting to tell people to just pickup the phone and call me. :-)
SPAM solution made easy: 1 spammer, 5 cords of rope, 5 hourses, and fireworks. Be creative.
1 GB or 1 TB whatever, something which is never considered is the kind of customers you want.
I think you would get better customers (sell ads at a bigger price) if you put a small fee for the service if it's well deserved.
I don't understand how someone who doesn't want to spend 10$/month to handle his mail can have a decent probability to be interested in buying a dell server, a travel to world top 100 beaches or mortgage refinancing (some examples from yahoo just now)
I know this sounds like "who cares to help these guys they'll never vote for us anyway"
My gmail account never appeeared to change. I had it open and checked last night right before bed (~10PM PDT). Woke up this morning, it's still 1000MB.
Probably just a momentary typo on Google's part.
On another topic, I think that Google is way ahead of the pack. Forget Spymac, and I bet Lycos is only a little better.
Things I like about Gmail:
- 1000MB
- Really simple & clean interface
- The searching
- The concept of labels instead of folders (hated it at first, love it now)
- The spam filtering. It seems to work really well.
- The fact that the Gmail interface is so speedy. This appears to be due to the gigantic use of Javascript. Click on a message, it appears near instantaneously. Move to another folder, near instantaneous.
Things I don't like about Gmail:
- No saving of drafts (yet). I've submitted this to the gmail team and apparently they're working on it.
- Doesn't work well with Safari. Although I'm starting to use Firefox on OS X more and more.
- No way to export or import messages. This makes it hard to backup or archive messages. Not that I don't trust Google's backup capabilities, but it would be nice to have the ability to somehow export messages so I can archive them on CD-R's/etc.
I love Gmail though, and now use it as my main email account.
>I would guess that these costs will far outstrip the $1 per GB cost of a Hard Drive.
Slashdot recently quoted Google executives saying that they budget $2 for a backed-up, airconditioned, installed gigabyte.
I know this is pretty much offtopic, but while we're on the topic of storage capacity ... everybody seems to be focusing on the storage capabilities of GMail, but what about services like Ofoto? They've got more than 11 million accounts, yet only 1 million of those have ever placed an order for prints. Email is a known beast. I don't imagine that file-size per email will increase significantly in the next 5 years ... but the same can't be said for the size of digital photos. How will Ofoto handle storing thumbnails and full-size copies of everybody's digital photos from their 12megapixel cameras in a year or two?
If anyone's interested in a good quick read on the topic, check out PC Magazine.
yeah cool! huh? ;-)
is measured in base 10, not base 2.
They'll soon offer a googal of email storage
has it occured to anyone else that gmail might save space by not storing individual copies of spam, chain letters, mailing list items, etc? just md5 every message (then check content if theres a match, just in case) and store pointers in people's mailboxes. 50000 people get the same spam, gmail uses 50000*n+1*N space instead of 50000*N (n is a small pointer, N is a big message) space.
so after the NGSCB story and this, am I to assume that '[updated]' in a headline mean '[goof]'? ;)
'This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it' - Eeyore
I wonder if Google could compare files by filesize and checksum, and instead of storing a copy for every user that receives a file just store a single copy.
Why have 20,000 copies of the mpg of the monkey sniffing his finger and falling out of the tree?
+5000, Informative.
But If I send you a 200 K file, the file become a mail of 400 k, that you can compress on gmail to, maybe, 210 k. Ok,... If I send you 400 k of text the result will be.. maybe 200 o 100 k.
My engrish is dificult to read. arrh..!...
What I am triing to say is that mail send in a unoptimized method, so the store method can have a gain. You NOT send 300 k of zip binary data, but 400 k of unoptimized uuendecoded or base64 data. So exist some space to optimize.
-Woof woof woof!
Ever noticed it's the little sized people who always say this?
Pity this turned out to be cock-up rather than reality. When I first read about this on someone's blog, I assumed it was a prank - but then thats what I thought when they first unveiled Gmail as well; shows what I know! I've been using Gmail for about 3 weeks, and to be honest, I can't ever imaine needing more than 1GB
This must be a mistake. They can't give away 1TB of free disk space at today's prices. Disks still cost about $1/GB. Even if they could get half price with bulk discounts, and another ten times better by reclaiming empty space from one account to give to another, no company can afford to give away $50 of disk space for free to anyone who signs up.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Google must learn so much from websites like this one. From reading many comments they could do things that they may not have thought of before, as there are so many people giving their input.
Just send an e-mail to the address you want, if it's not avaible you'll get an error message right away.
:)
That's what happened to me at least
or who gives it, I am still not paying a dime for email...plain and simple. I have a work address, 98% of what I get thru my other addresses is garbage spam anyways so I will just do without if it comes to cost. I don't think I am alone in that state of mind, nor do I see how they think they are going to make money...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I love the effect this is having on the industry...
.mac account than I've gotten. My main reason for renewing it he first year was to support Apple. Even the iBlog product which was really cute at first got old real fast when I realized I'd have no control over the blog when I was away from the Apple computer. I've never shared the .Mac e-mail address with friends, so all I get there is announcements from Apple, a $99 donation would make more sense. Out of curiosity I tried the Spymac website (which the ZDNet article mentions is also overing a free Gig) and the page never finishes loading. One thing I don't think the PHBs have figured out yet is that you have to do MORE than offer a Gig to everyone, you have to actually have the infrastructure to support it. I wonder how many others will make that mistake and offer more than their server can handle. The 1-terabyte limit last night on GMail was pretty obviously an error. Google EMPLOYEES are said to have that much space, and they seem to have gotten the user lists co-mingled for a few hours (not everyone saw the 1-T limit, and experiments showed that it was acting as a 1-T limit, not just a typo) but it wouldn't surprise me if Google had the capacity NOW to up the ante to 10G should anyone actually respond with a similar offer. Nobody really has though...
I was happy to get a Gmail account finally and have been busy redirecting news service subscriptions and the like from some of my other "lesser" services. How pathetic it seems that I'm being asked to renew my $99/year mac.com account when the primary service provided by them is e-mail. I expected a lot more from the
I'm a VERY original user of Yahoo. I have an 8M Inbox there instead of the standard 4 as a result (I guess). I get tons of spam there and so far their efforts have done little to stop it. At one point the spam they filtered out automatically and into the "Bulk mail" folder was charged against the 8M limit. That meant I was almost always over my limit unless I checked it constantly. I noticed that now the Bulk Mail no longer counts. Good (overdue) move. I also PAY for a domain through Yahoo Domains. Their e-mail started out unlimited, years ago. Later they sent out a notice that there WAS a limit (in the 20-30M range I think) but I can't find that documented anywhere now. I saw the news articles on Yahoo expanding the free limits to 100M and the payed e-mail limits to 1G to "match" Google. Um... $35 a year for something doesn't "match" that same thing for free. I'm sure the Yahoo board of directors will figure that out soon.
Microsoft plans to steal some Google thunder by bundling a search engine with Windows. Apple did this too with OS X in the form of a program called Sherlock (nice name anyway). I tried it a few times. It was slow. Very. And the results were no better than Google. I wonder how many people use Sherlock just because it's there? Google works with any browser, on any operating system and isn't dependent on Internet circuits to Redmond being in good shape. The real worry for MS I suspect is the rumor that Google might offer other Windows-like services in the future. The technology is there. I signed up for Think-Free Office for a year at $50 and got storage (not a lot as I recall) and a Java based program that would read and write Word, Excell, PowerPoint and some other MS formatted files. It worked pretty well (I tested it on Windows, Linux, and OS X). I didn't renew the account, but the software still works locally. Essentially the $49 was for the disk space, but also included the software and (had I renewed) updates to the software. Were it not for OpenOffice, and the fact that I use Linux almost all the time, I would probably still keep an account. What if, in order to remain competitive in the home-user space, Microsoft is forced to give away Office, or at least bundle it free with all new computers (by whatever arm-twisting means they use to bundle Windows now)? It would b
I just bought an invitation for $40 on Ebay...
Not to be outdone, Google will continue to top others until they reach their absolute limit which will be a googol bytes of storage space.
You'll never get to use it.
Not to be outdone, Google will continue to increase the amount of storage space until they reach their absolute highest limit.....which will be a googol bytes of online storage.
If anyone can send out a GMail Beta invitation, I'd be happy to accept! C'mon, don't Bogart the access!
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
As of 12:20pm, EDT, my gmail box still says 1000000 MB.
Humm,
If you brand spanking new email service is in beta, and you have a limited number of testers who are all connected enough to have received a gMail invite, what better way to test how well the system handles a massive load over a given period of time then by upping the storage limit on a few key accounts to 1TB?
As the news hits the field, I am sure everyone with a gMail acount logged on ASAP to see if the reports were true (I know I did).
Michael Bolton: I must have put a decimal point in the wrong place or something. Shit, I always do that, I always mess up some mundane detail!
if the editor had read the article, the first damn paragraph it clearly states that it was a bug and its being fixed, yet even in his update his mention of the comments in the thread is clearly just speculation. had he read the article, he wouldnt have to rely on comments in the thread.
It's very possible that Google is not looking to become the only email you'll ever need, but literally your harddrive as well. Can you think of anything you'd like to offload from your HD to free up space? We're talking about more potential than just email packrats here. We're talking about entire media archives. Hundreds of MP3s. Photos. A movie or two.
But I'm also wondering if this is as legit as they'd have you believe, or whether it's like the old Simplenet burnout-- Unlimited space as long as you don't try to use it all/try to host stuff we don't like. I think they're banking on the same strategy though... 90% of the people won't use anywhere close to their allotment of one (or 100) gig. And lets be brutally honest, for a lifetime mailbox, does anybody here actually believe Google will last that long? They're a search engine with advertising ties. their position in the market is very assaliable by the competition. They're positioning they're IPO to capitallize the most off their name and publiciity wich will most likely drive prices higher than they're actually worth, THEN refuse to report their projected earnings, which will insulate them from negative opinion when times get bad. good for them, bad for investors.
For a company that pledges not to be evil, they're playing their cards pretty close to their chest in order to maximize the amount of money they can make off public ignorance and media hype.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Thank you for your report. As always, each Gmail user is offered 1,000 megabytes (MB) of storage. We apologize for any confusion this issue may have caused. We are aware of this problem, and our engineers are working diligently to find a solution. In the meantime, sending and receiving email in your Gmail account will reset your storage limit counter to 1,000 MB. We appreciate your patience during our limited test period, and we thank you for taking the time to send us your feedback and concerns.
We hope you enjoy Google's approach to email.
Sincerely,
The Gmail Team
Very funny, Scotty. Now beam down my clothes.
Gmail Team to me
More options 10:02am (31 minutes ago)
Hello,
Thank you for your message and bug report regarding the incorrect quota
amount listed in your Gmail account.
As always, each Gmail user is offered 1,000 megabytes (MB) of storage.
We apologize for any confusion this issue may have caused. We are aware of
this problem, and our engineers are working diligently to find a solution.
In the meantime, sending and receiving email in your Gmail account will
reset your storage limit counter to 1,000 MB. We appreciate your patience
during our limited test period, and we thank you for taking the time to
send us your feedback and concerns.
We hope you enjoy Google's approach to email.
Sincerely,
The Gmail Team
ok now that we have more storage who's up for writing a subversion over gmail client.
every time you check in a file it mails it to your gmail account
when crap hits the fan and you need an old file back you can either login manually and retrieve theee appropriate version or write a wrapper to do it for you
First off -- nothing is said about not having multiple attachments per email. This is a "Good Thing"(tm)
Well, it would be if you were correct.
Take it from a longtime Blogger user--the 10MB limit is per-email, not per-attachment.
Just encrypt the file.. they can look all they want.. As long as the AUP allows the use of the space ( or bandwidth in the case of an ISP ) they cant complain about 'usage'.
But ya you can still piss them off and they cut you off.
I guess I'm not average, id suck all the space because they agreed to offer it to me..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Time to start a project on SourceForge that does backup via GMail. There is certainly more than enough space for it.
Times are tough right now in the federal govt. Imagine my superiors' delight this morning when I totally eliminated my agency's need for costly data backup facilities using a short Perl script which simply emails tarballs of the hard drives of our 3000+ machines to my GMail account!
:-)
PS Just looked and I'm still at 1TB
Can anyone else send or receive 10 MB attachements? I tested and can only send up to 5 MB. I tried a 9 and then a 7 MB attachment, but each time it told me I had exceeded the 10 MB limit - which obviously wasn't the case...
Perhaps if you do not find enough value in .Mac, it's because you view the e-mail account as the most important feature.
.Mac account was created when iTools first came out, as a free service to promote OS 9. I just grabbed it for the cool e-mail account. Since mail was the only feature I made any real use of (other than a little bit of HomePage) I wasn't willing to pay $99 to keep it going when the .Mac changeover came. Last time I ever use someone else's domain for my primary e-mail address. Good lesson to learn. Anyway...now I have .Mac again, and I use it for the other stuff far more than I use the mail.
.Mac are: .Mac (which is $69 with a new Mac.) .Mac mail and Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail: .Mac mail is real mail. You can use both IMAP/POP/SMTP and a nice webmail interface. This is still key for many of us. I refuse to ever use webmail at home. It's only for use on someone else's computer.
.Mac, but that's not why I posted. Just wanted to share my personal experience.)
Granted, my first
In my opinion, the best features of
- seamless iDisk integration in the Finder (especially in 10.3)
- Share your public folder (example - not mine)on the web. The fastest way to get a file to someone else across the Internet.
- One-click photo album publishing from within iPhoto. Creates thumbnails and screen-size versions and lets you choose from many templates. Your visitors can view the photos in a slideshow viewer and click the photos within that to see the full resolution. View an example (not mine).
- Put a movie in your Movies folder, create a HomePage for it, and let Apple bother with embedding it properly, streaming it, etc. Again, templates are provided.
- Free Virex. Tends to cost $69 anyway, so when buying a new Mac you'd be silly not to get
- Backup utility. Pretty cool automatic backup utility.
- Here's a glaring difference between
- Auto-sync Bookmarks, Address Book, and iCal appointments/To Do items across all your Macs.
If you use it as just an e-mail service, I can understand why you would be disappointed at the pricing.
(Full disclosure: I work at a large computer retailer that sells
A programmer at Google forgot to put the decimal point in the right place, or forgot to divide by 1K, or something similar. As a result, absolutely nothing happened except that the quota was displayed incorrectly. BFD. Not everything Google does is automatically interesting, or news.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
I only use overrated because there's no appropriate "wrong" or "incorrect" moderation for posts that are factually incorrect. I don't like using it, but there's no other way.
It seems an inevitable paradigm in the world of software creation: someone has an idea, and works it out. The first implementation is recognized by some humans as fulfilling a need, so the someone works on and on upon his idea, until he realizes that he could found a company selling the software. The company meets success, sometimes even huge success. And then it turns out that, not in the first and basic idea but in the bare fact that the founder of the company is ( are ) a human being(s), is hidden the very seed of tyranny upon users. Such has been the story of Microsoft, and the announcement of Google GMail seems to confirm that Google will follow a similar "Rise and Fall" paradigm. Whoever reads this article on the internet has personal experience with this paradigm, at the user side.
Searching on the internet, i.e. searching the internet itself, is a daily necessity for millions of us. Google, in its initial times, met this need, and at the time of writing of these words Google has, in this field, the same kind of status that Microsoft once had in the field of operating systems for consumer pc's: hardly anybody would think to use another product. Thus, indexing and searching the internet is, basically, the prerogative of one corporation; millions of people trust it blindly. As pointed out above, no corporation should be trusted blindly.
As history taught us, monopolies are dangerous.
Are you people REALLY going to trust a company that you don't know from within, a company that already publicly announced to have plans for indexing YOUR emails ? Geez people - think !!
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
If google is slashdotted, or too slow, try this google mirror.
warning: This post is likely to contain gobs of dripping sarcasm. Consume at your own risk.
I tested and can only send up to 5 MB. I tried a 9 and then a 7 MB attachment, but each time it told me I had exceeded the 10 MB limit - which obviously wasn't the case...
Email attachments are encoded (usually base64), which adds quite a bit of overhead. Someone else said it was around 30%, but I believe it may be more than that for binary attachments...
So your 7MB message, when encoded, likely does in fact exceed 10MB...
NGWave - Fast Sound Editor for Windows
I lost 3GB of mail I received after they set the limit back down to 1GB.
paintball
Here's an article about it
Michael Bolton: Shit! I always do that. I always mess up some mundane detail.
Slagheap
First against the wall when the revolution comes
if( u think u may get 1 TB) { see_this("http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml %3Ftype%3DinternetNews%26storyID%3D5195988");
}
else
{
exit(0);
}
I wonder if I can send my hard drive as an attachment.
I wonder when google will enter webhosting. I mean the have all the tools to do it right. Instead of 1GB of space 50 MB of space and some GB of bandwidth.
I'm sure they will not get screwed in general as most geocites/lycos/msn/blogs don't get more then 10 hits a month and nine of them being the webmaster himself and the other one his mother. (lol like my site)
-- I don't buy it, I grow it.
Hey-- that does suggest a possible anti-SPAM strategy-- wasn't it Yahoo that got the idea of giving you a bank of mailboxes so you could give a different one to each commercial service you use that require one and then shut it down when they give it to spammers?
What about "use once" accounts that dissappear after the first mail they recieve-- it forwards you the one confirmation mail you need and then goes away. Or perhaps for a limited time-- a day, week, month, etc. then auto-self-destructs?
How about placing bogus email links on pages everywhere that are constantly changing to a new random bogus address to keep filling up the spammers lists that use spiderbots with mountains of useless addresses...
reminds me of my aol warez days... I don't think there was a limit to how much mail you could have. people would upload a hundred or so emails to the servers, and then go into a chat room and forward to anyone who asked. once it was on aol's servers, I think aol just provided a virtual link to the single email to anyone it was forwarded to. I saw a gigabyte of mail transfered simultaniously to about 100 users in under a minute that way. (the slow part was waiting for it to all download. but there were pretty great queing functionality for that too)
I see everybody talking about gmail, most from the perspective of having an account. What I want to know is how does one _get_ an account?
Gmail Team to me More options 1:24pm (3½ hours ago) Hello, Thank you for your report. As always, each Gmail user is offered 1,000 megabytes (MB) of storage. We apologize for any confusion this issue may have caused. We are aware of this problem, and our engineers are working diligently to find a solution. In the meantime, sending and receiving email in your Gmail account will reset your storage limit counter to 1,000 MB. We appreciate your patience during our limited test period, and we thank you for taking the time to send us your feedback and concerns. Sincerely, The Gmail Team
"Persistence is annoying success." - ghee22 11:28:1999 - 10:53:PM
A few weeks ago, my GMail account had a "tell a friend!" link, when they were expanding the number of users. In it, you had three slots for e-mail addresses, in which three people would get an e-mail address of their choosing. All you needed was their e-mail. The problem was, they didn't bother to notice if a person used (a) the same account twice, or (b) a gmail account. So now I have three GMail accounts, which considering the current state of the market concerning these things, could be a very interesting deal. Sell the three, but keep my active account. All I'm saying really is, keep an eye out for this link - and the Genie shall reward.
YahooPops
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I can just imagine Hotmail and Yahoo executives having a heart attack on that little mistake. :)
Alright, so they didn't really up the limit, it's just a bug. But still, does it really matter? The point of Gmail is that you never have to delete an email. So my question is- if they say the limit is 1,000 megs, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, does it really matter? The intent is that you never notice the cap. Besides, by the time 1,000 becomes feasable, I bet they'll raise the limit.
Now offering 1PB (petabyte) of storage... Store all your email for all your family.. forever and then some..
mix_master_mike
vafrous
A. XMail will provide you with the best email services and an inbox providing one (1) exabyte of capacity for storage. This will be provided free of charge. You will not pay anything to XMail or make an exchange of any legal value whatsoever for these priveleges.
(Etc., etc., etc...)
Let's see who can identify the legal problem with the above contract?
Hint: It's not a contract.
This was never a glitch. It is part of Google's marketing scheme to hype Gmail.
I cant believe so many people thought it was a glitch.
10MB limit eh?
split -b $((1024*1024*10)) file splitfile
I wasn't trying to be funy, I was serious. google buys hardware by the boatload, I was postulating they would bein a position to have their own hardware fabbed/manufactured when they have several billions spare change hanging around. And they could then theoretically start owning chunks of the fatpipes infrastructure. Hmm, sort of more or less what AOL did, but with google brains behind it.