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E-mail As the New Database

Posted by Zonk on from the saving-for-a-rainy-day dept.

jira writes "BBC has an article confirming the trend of using inbox as a sort of personal database. At my workplace I can personally attest to the growing sizes of those pst files and an unwillingness to erase any emails because of 'loss of information'." From the article: "The trend has become more pronounced as the services have dramatically increased their storage capacity in response to upstart Gmail offering a free service with 1,000 megabytes (Mb) of storage." Update: 04/22 23:03 GMT by Z : To reflect that the story is at respected news organization BBC, not a BBS.

14 of 389 comments (clear)

  1. 2120 MB by nacturation · · Score: 4, Funny

    Thanks to Google's Infinite Improbability Storage Drive, storage space is now at 2.120 GB to 1 and rising.

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    1. Re:2120 MB by 91degrees · · Score: 2, Funny

      I think that was the telephone nukber at my old flat in islington.

    2. Re:2120 MB by jgold03 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Some of my buddies and I played an interesting game: Who could get a fresh Gmail account filled the fastest, and only with external mail (no uploading files to yourself). I won, and did it in exactly 1 week. Some of my techniques:

      - Joining high volume Yahoo! Groups and Google Groups, and getting them to forward every message to me. There are a bunch of really weird groups in other countries that send p0rn around to each other.
      - Every single kernel, debian, fc, slackerware, apache, mysql, etc. mailing list we could find... and WHOA we got a lot of mail from that
      - P0rn sites ("Enter your email address for free p0rn in your email" really gets you on a lot of spam lists)
      - Google "email mailing lists"

      In a week, I had 29,000 emails in my inbox taking up 2.1 GB. I'm suprised Google hasn't terminated my account since I'm over my quota and get about 5000+ emails a day now.

  2. 1G of space? by flicman · · Score: 2, Funny

    Doesn't GMail offer more space than that now? When was this article submitted?

    Maybe it's submissions get rejected immediately but take weeks to be accepted? This one clearly sat in the queue for 3 weeks.

  3. 1,000 MB? by soloport · · Score: 1, Funny

    Am I the only one with 2,000 MB?

    And, yes, e-mail as a pseudo-database is wonderful -- well, with the conveniences gmail offers, at least. But with .pst files?! Pulllllease. That's SO 1990's. ;)

  4. Actually... by civman2 · · Score: 3, Funny

    "Gmail offering a free service with 1,000 megabytes (Mb) of storage."

    I don't know about you, but my Gmail has 2121.046851 megabytes of storage space. I mean 2121.047702 megabytes. I mean 121.048913 megabytes. I mean...

  5. My personal database.. by brxndxn · · Score: 2, Funny

    My personal database says that I'm a pervert with a small penis who uses lots of prescription drugs financed by taking a 2nd mortgage and my relative in Nigeria.

    Doesn't anyone else just think that email totally sucks? I can't remember the last time I checked my email other than to hit 'confirm' when I signed up for some stupid web service like nytimes.com.

    Every time I try to save an email, it ends up getting deleted anyway when I'm throwing out the spam 100's of emails at a time. Email is useless as it is and nothing important should ever be done with an email.

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  6. Re:Guilty by Spirckle · · Score: 3, Funny

    Hey, don't you have to go manage somebody about now?

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  7. Re:Worst. Submission. Ever. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    Blame it on clippy, it always works for CmdrTaco.

  8. Re:Why not? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    I hear they're rolling out gporn.com, where you can store all your smut. Given that 99% of people have all the same crap, it shouldn't take more than a few terabytes to store it all.

  9. Re:ok then by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    I assume you mean to pay back 1000 megadollars.

  10. Re:Guilty by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    How much will you pay for english lessons?

    I'll throw in the insights for free.

  11. Re:Getting Things Done by Moofie · · Score: 2, Funny

    "The biggest benefit so far in implementing this system has been rapid context switches: the biggest benefit so far has been faster context switches:"

    Wow! And it comes with free redundant sentence structure! I'm THERE!

    (I kid, I kid!)

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  12. Re:Guilty by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    OR, if you're not paranoid, you can store stuff in your email account and not worry about people in black suits sporting dark sunglasses trying to get to your data.