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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.
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
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 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.
gmail filesystem anyone?
/dev/gmailfs /home
dump 0f
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
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
Yes, but does he save for half damage or no damage? It is a very important question...
In all seriousness, however, piracy may or may not be an issue. After all, it does partly depend on how traceable an individual is. If the email address comes at a price (non-free that is), then they will need your credit card info, which means that they could trace any pirates to the source. I wouldn't be caught dead doing things like that.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
I don't think it would be too hard to write a script that compiles all of your files into 10MB RARs and sends them to your gmail account. You could keep remote backups of all of your documents, mail, etc.
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)?
When I read the
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.
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.
A small addenum, just for kicks:
The 4 friends I mentioned that also received terabyte accounts immediately set up a plan to collude and mailbomb one account to test the 1 gigabyte threshold. The account in question went up to 700 megabytes before the limit was changed back to 1,000 megabytes. Darn =P
What better way to see the Internet community's response to 1 TB of storage?
GMail's not been receiving the huge media attention it was a month ago, and this "mistake" puts it back in the spotlight.
This is just a wild guess, but maybe they don't allocate the whole 1TB of disk space to each user when they sign up, but only allocate on demand.
And as many posters have pointed out, most people are unlikely to use anywhere near 1GB let alone 1Tb. Especially with the 10MB attachment limit it will take 10^5 bloated e-mails to reach capacity.
On the other hand I like the idea of using an account as an offsite incremental backup. My daily incrementals are generally less than 10MB, it would be a very convenient method of storage. Until they claim that they have rights to any intellectual property stored on their servers. But they wouldn't do that because Google Are Nice People (TM).
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!
Unless people start using this as a free remote backup service. Just back up your drive into multiple tarballs or zip volumes, each of which fit under the size limit for attachments, and mail them to yourself. A simple program could keep track of everything quite easily.
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.
Am I the only one who recall Altavista and Netscape promising "e-mail for life"?? Both e-mail services are gone, now...
I'm sure you could make Gmail appear as NFS by creating a local RPC service to act as an intermediary. The filesystem could be split into 10Mb blocks, inode numbers, permissions etc could be stored in the message body. Gmail's message search functionality could quickly identify which message contains what inodes and retrieve the correct attachment as appropriate. Sounds like a fun OSS project to me. :)
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
Thats like - a Life time of Mail (TM)
Not really. The Big Thinkers (TM) say that a lifetime's worth of data storage will be around a petabyte. That counts video, too.
For interesting reading, google "Memex" and "MyLifeBits."
I write in my journal
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
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.
It wouldn't be that hard to set up filters and scripts to auto-reply to properly formatted requests for files by sending the requested file, zipped and broken up into 10MB chunks. Think listserve.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
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.
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Objects in Mirror are Losing!
Or slow access disk.
<OldFartMode>
Way back in the day, I went through a period where I had too little disk quota to hold the temporary data I was generating in some experiments.
I used to email large (but non critical) files to myself via several US uucp sites then do the work. In a couple of days the prodigal files would return, by which time I'd have gotten rid of the temporary data.
Of course, `large' in those days was measured in KB, not GB.
</OldFartMode>
A little ingenuity with fetchmail and google has given you a terabyte disk. If they come looking for you with big sticks, I never said this.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
I could use it. For one thing, I'm an email packrat, and only delete my yahoo mail when I'm out of space. But a 1TB account would be useful for so much more than email. I think of it as free web-based storage. If I could get my hands on a free-for-life 1TB gmail account, I would whip up some code to encrypt and store arbitrary information as gmail messages. With the privacy concerns regarding gmail, encryption would be a necessity for using gmail in this fashion. A proper interface would allow gmail to look like an encrypted, web-based file system.
Also, it appears that there is a 10MB limit per message. No problem, just treat gmail as a harddrive with variable block sizes, up to 10MB. Storing larger files would simply mean splitting the file across multiple messages.
They could cap upload streams at 64Kb/s and it would take four years to fill (if someone wanted to keep at it day and night) - heck in four years 1TB hard drives will be commonplace and cheap.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
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
At work we've got 3 terabytes of data on (archiveable) CDRs in boxes...
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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.
Depending on how exactly the ad system works, it's probably in Google's interest to have Gmail's users amass collections of e-mails as large as possible. The larger the database of e-mails, the larger pool of text Google can analyze (presuming people don't keep a large amounts of junk mail and what not) and learn to better target ads.
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
If not, I guess you could write something to send/retrieve your mail through lynx...this way, all could be encoded with something like PGP.
But, it would be easier if you didn't have to go through the web interface...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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).