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.

Comments

Bigger != better

[Willeh]

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.)

Re:Bigger != better

[1u3hr]

Even routinely changing passwords monthly or so and only notifying paying members.

Any asshole could change the password and not tell anyone, and/or delete any or all files. And you know there are lots of jerks who love to do stuff like that. So you could only use this amongst a small trusted group.

Re:Bigger != better

[brunes69]

The use will make itself apparant someday.

Sure, my mailbox is well under 10 MB, even with my thousands of emails. And even the 6-10 MB limits at most webmail sites are plenty storage for the average person.

But all it takes is that *one* time you need to recieve a 5-10 MB Email attachment from soemone, and it is something important, and your provider barfs on you to totally have you screaming for blood.

The biggest benefit this increased storage has is the ability to recieve larger attachments.

Re:Bigger != better

[jbarr]

You're missing a key point: Space is not the only issue. I have over 300 offline emails that I have archived over the years that I would LOVE to get imported into Gmail. Mainly, these are emails such as product registrations, "memorable" emails from family and friends, and a myriad of tidbits that I've saved over the years. By leveraging Gmail's extended capacity as well as its excellent Search and Label functionality, I could more efficiently manage these archived emails and new emails far better than I can now, and I could keep them online for instant access. Only added capacity AND functionality makles this possible.

Spam

[doneagain]

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.

Re:Whoa?

[Azureflare]

I think that's the whole POINT. Google is marketing gmail as something where you will NEVER EVER have to delete email, even if you use it for 80 years.

Pretty dang cool marketing tactic, if you ask me.

Meaningless, but still cool

[Idaho]

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 :)

Re:non sense

[shione]

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. :)

Beta test

[logic-gate]

Ummm... isn't it the case when something is being beta tested, bugs like this will occur.

Nobody really expects a terrabyte of storage do they?

How long would it take to transfer 1tb?

[Mindragon]

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...

Re:time to ebay my account

[axis_omega]

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.

Re:Could this put google out of business

[amorsen]

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.

"unlimited" internet?

[sremick]

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.

Re:time to ebay my account

[Short Circuit]

Exactly. You aren't the average user. And what the average user doesn't use in their accounts, you'll use in yours.

Missing Costs

[cgenman]

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.

Re:This is excellent

[pjt33]

"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.