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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.
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.
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.
Pretty dang cool marketing tactic, if you ask me.
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'
None to the average user but 10000megs allows Google to claim it has the largest free email storage space. guess they didn't like Lycos raining on their parade. :)
Nobody really expects a terrabyte of storage do they?
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. ;-)
They are also probally banking on the fact that almost no one will ever get close to such a high limit. Most people that use a free webmail are probally used to haveing to keep themselves unnder 4 Mb or so, so they have a ritual of deleteing it if its not mission critical. Therefore google can handle a lot more users that are keeping their box light then if we where all used to packing our inboxes to the brim, even when the brim is 1 Tb
GeekLeak.com - Silly name, serious geeks
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"
You can't mail the raw binaries, they have to be uuencoded or base64 encoded, which makes them into text files. Which compress very well, as you said.
Of course, this is not some magical way of compressing something that cannot be compressed, because the encoded file uses much more space than the original. But the 10MB per mail limit is the encoded version. If you plan on backing up your whole system this way, you will soon grow tired of sending 5-8MB blobs of data per e-mail, long before you reach the 80GB of a current hard drive.
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.
I wonder now, if this wasn't the plan in the first place... To get people to buy stocks. First give them free Gig email, then give them a little piece of what they can really give little by little, so people will crave to buy...
They are not really in the email business (yet). Searching seems their main business as of now. And they pay that with advertising only? I know they have the brainpower of some of the brightiest geeks out there. But surely they must have a better skeem of somekind to give (freely) that much email space. I mean my last hardrive cost me 200$ US and I got 40 Gig...
I'm really starting to think that this much altruism is really gonna profite some few people.
Or they have found a hole in the thin layer of space and time, and manage to be able to give without any real return on investment (ROI).
Call me paranoid, call me non-believer, believe me I WANT to believe. But nothing on earth is free. People don't give unless, they get something in return. Unless they want to polish they're image. (Like Micro$oft with Hotmail. Theyre less evil, cause they give free emails)
But Google does'nt need a better image, they are the image. The best search engine ever in human history( for now ). I think they're in for the money.
It's funny how I make sense to others and not myself...
Cheap IDE drives and massive oversubscription. Backing up to tape is so last millenium, anyway. By the way, you can probably give each server quad 250GB IDE for the price of just the fibre channel controller. SAN has to be massively easier to administer (or massively faster, good luck with that) in order to make sense.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
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?).
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.
...*MY* GMail has a billion kagillion MB's! At that size, who really cares?
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.
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.
Exactly. You aren't the average user. And what the average user doesn't use in their accounts, you'll use in yours.
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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
> To get the 1GB account you will need to cough up 3.49GBP a month.
Don't forget also, that Lycos has to send the plaintext of every email you send or receive through several actual closed-source programs! This is a terrible privacy invasion! I will only use mail providers (and send email to others who use mail providers) who guarantee that my email will go through NO programs whatsoever!
</sarcasm>
"I was just clobbered hard by having no backups, but if I had storage elsewhere I'd use that instead and still have no backups"? I think that's a fair summary of what you said.
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....
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.
This won't work for the vast majority of spam. Most spammers have started inserting random data into the payload of their spam messages just to get around spam filters that are already using MD5 hashes of messages to detect potential spam. For example, Hotmail has the "report this as spam" button, which, when a user clicks it, takes an MD5 of the message and tries to find duplicates system-wide, in other mailboxes, or adds that MD5 to their spam table to check new inbound messages against it.
Good idea though; it just seems like the arms race between spammers and anti-spammers will keep going forever.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon