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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
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.
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
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
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?
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
After clicking on 'Compose Mail,' just click on 'Attach a file.' At that point, you'll be able to browse the files on your computer and add your attachment. Once you've selected a file to attach, click the 'Open' button and that file will be added to your message. You will see the path of your file listed just below the subject field. If you'd like to get rid of the attachment, just click 'remove.' With Gmail, you can send and receive messages with a maximum total size of 10MB.
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.
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.
999998000 MB
If religous zealots don't believe in Evolution, then why are they so worried about bird flu?
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
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.
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...
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.
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!
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?
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).
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?).
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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...
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 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
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!
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.
Looks like just one more reason to get top dollar when I auction my account ;)
Slashdot I hate you!!!!!
Everytime slashdot runs the freakin' gmail story it DRIVES UP the price.
Just when things begin to cool off, THERE IS another slashdot story!!
Either stop it, or I start posting Soviet Russia jokes again -- YOUR CHOICE!
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
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.
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
I'm currently working on a linux file system driver that uses google email boxes. Performance isn't that great, but I'm working on that. I can already tell that fsck.google is gonna be a bitch.
Um...I believe you have my terabyte?