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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.

3 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 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. 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.