Slashdot Mirror
Google Vows to Increase Gmail Limit
An anonymous reader writes "Google claims that people are devouring capacity with photos and other attachments on its Gmail e-mail service faster than the company can add to it at its current pace. So Google said on Friday that it would increase the rate at which it is adding capacity to its web-based service. There's only one problem, Google's main competitors — Windows Live Hotmail and Yahoo Mail — far surpassed Gmail this year with their own capacity."
hands up who here uses gmail to the max?
myself after 2 years im only using ~500MB
Yahoo! Mail went to unlimited like six months ago. Anyone still watching their mail space should focus their time fending off mastodon with their obsidian knives.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
I find it astounding that people would so willing store so much personal information on the servers of these companies. I don't care if we're talking about Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, or some other company. It's just damn scary to think that so many people would just give out all that data. Is it because they're ignorant of the risks? Or maybe they know, but it's convenient, and they're willing to take the chance that the naked photos of themselves that they're storing in their hosted email account could be publically released?
/ It's true, people is attaching files of \
| huge size! My back wire pains and my |
\ job insurance won't cover it! /
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\ / __ \
\ O| |O|
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cpu0: Microsoft Clippium ("GenuineClippy" ChromedMetal-Class). Paperbinding, lockpicking, fish-hook-hack support.
I won't be using it in the foreseeable future.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
In know lots of people whose photo collection is in their email.
- especially since the email providers made downloading multiple photos such a pain (I think this is done on purpose as Yet Another Lock-In).
No sig today...
i'd be really happy if they allowed me to delete the attachments but leave the email. i believe the feature was requested yonks ago but so far has not happened. i'm currently at 50% but that would drop to less than 10% if i could delete the attachments i already have downloaded.
other than that i cannot fault the service. i get my email at work, home and on my phone with no hassles. thanks google!
especially since the email providers made downloading multiple photos such a pain (I think this is done on purpose as Yet Another Lock-In).
Or because, you know, they never intended to be your photo repository.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
GMail has been in beta for more than a year now! I wonder why.
Microsoft can advertise that users have a larger capacity with ease - many users have reported that attachments aren't transmitted when using Hotmail, and I've experienced this phenomena personally. Easy to add vaporous capacity to Hotmail, or would bogus be a better term? Gmail on the other hand has never done this to me.
I can understand using these services as a backup, but as people shift more and more of their online life to web 2.0, they will find that less and less of their files/data/structured products reside on their own local PC. How many people have a full backup of their Flickr albums (with all the organization structures and metadata that they've enter into flickr?) How many people have a full backup of their GMail accounts? These systems are just one botched upgrade away from data loss (does Google or its competitors have a full backup of ALL users' mail service data and will the restore process actual work?)
I also wonder at what point in time will internet criminals shift their attentions to online services such as Hotmail/Yahoo/GMail as a means of hosting spam/scam operations. A smart scammer could parasitize a group of GMail accounts and send out a few spams a day from each account from a million accounts at once. As long as the scammer obfuscates their emails (use Picassa to create CAPTCHA-like GIF spam) so that the Gmail doesn't notice a million identical emails being sent for a million accounts, the parasite process can survive. And if a criminal finds a way to create an internal GMail worm (one that can propagate itself from account to account without any interaction by the account holder), then they can turn the entire GMail system into a botnet.
My point is that these massive system have some serious single-points of failure and are becoming extremely high-value targets for internet criminals.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Burn all that e-mail that's burning your account on a DVD overnighted to you for only $50!!! For an extra $20, all the e-mail that has been burned will be tagged "DVD" so you can delete it in a click!!!
Seriously, I never understood this obsession with e-mail limits. Who really needs this much e-mail storage? Who? Sure, if you were some Internet celebrity getting a pile of e-mail, then you might need some sort of infinite storage. I think that a letter to the right people at Google, and maybe some money, could get you infinite storage if you really were a celebrity.
Seriously though. I have been using GMail for domains for years now. I like to think I get an average amount of e-mail. I never delete anything, and the GMail spam filter is in perfect working order. As of right now I am using 404 MB (13%) of my 2910 MB. Why the hell do I need more space? Maybe if I were using that GMail file system thing to store stuff. While that is a cool hack, it is entirely impractical. It's much easier to just get a real networked storage solution. I guess I would need more space if I were sending and receiving lots of large attachments. But e-mail attachments are crap. I never download attachments. They can't be trusted, even in Linux. And there are better and faster ways to transfer files to people than e-mail.
So seriously. You people who are dying for more storage, what the heck are you using all that space for? Are you an Internet celebrity getting a million e-mails? Are you not deleting your spam? Are you using e-mail attachments despite their obsolescence? I just don't get it.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Hotmail STILL has ads at the footer of every message sent. Neither Yahoo nor Gmail do that. Who cares how big they let your inbox be, if they make every email you send look like spam.
``There's only one problem, Google's main competitors Windows Live Hotmail and Yahoo Mail far surpassed Gmail this year with their own capacity.''
Problem? On the contrary! This is great. It's competition at work, improving things for users. Google offered lots of storage. Now it's competitors offer more. In response, Google will offer more. Whichever of these services you are using, you will get a better deal. The only problem here is how you can put all that space to good use.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
People are not utilizing their services to the fullest. Naturally, they are able to oversell their storage. As users utilize only percentages of that space you can go on allocating more to each user, because they will be only using a percentage of it anyway. Much common in the hosting world. but not advised.
Read radical news here
Or why does it say 1GB once you want to sign up?
Some of us use gmail for most of our email and use something less risky for the "naked photos of ourselves."
With the exception of probably the majority of us here, most computer users are completely devoid of any regular backup schedule regardless. IMHO this makes Gmail far superior for the average (read as: hopelessly unprepared) computer user. I've lost track of how many people I've heard say "I lost your email because my computer crashed" over the years. I've yet to hear one Gmail user say the same thing. That aside, I'm sure Google, of all companies out there, make some effort to ensure there's some amount of backup or redundancy as part of the Gmail system.
Who even wants to use something else than Gmail? I use Gmail as my personal email, and my company uses Gmail for domains for our email. From the day one Gmail has offered easy to use and intuitive web mail with enough free space. In about three years that I have used Gmail for my personal use, I have only succeeded in using 312Mb of it. My own company mail address has only gathered 157Mb. For those people who use web mail for email, I don't think that the space requirement has been after Gmail was launched a key part on comparing different email services. Even if Gmail still had only 1Gb limit, I still wouldn't even consider other services.
Also if somebody from Google is reading this message, what I need and want right now, that you are not offering is J2ME mobile client for Gmail for domains. It's ridicules that Google offers mobile client for regular Gmail, but for Gmail for domains there is non. There should be no technical reason for denying the client. If you don't want to offer it free, maybe you could offer it as a part of subscription for Gmail for domains. And no, I don't want to use mobile version via mobile browser, that just doesn't work as well as pure mobile client.
Another wish that I have is that Google besides raising email space would raise space for photos. I love Picasa and I have saved some of my personal photos to Picasa Web. The only thing why I haven't moved all my personal photos to it is that there just isn't enough space for it. Also I don't want to order subscription for it, as for me it's unclear what happens to photos if I end the subscription. Does Google just delete all photos after day 1 of non subscripted time? In example if I hurt my self or get sick, or my credit goes bad, and I can't afford to pay the subscription, I really wouldn't want all my loved photos just disappearing in bit space.
Survey research tool for commercial and scientific use
A few of you actually ran out of space, but un-till gmail will give you more space, you can delete your old big-sized emails.
You can search using the Search Box on your top page of your gmail, and do an "advanced" search to only look for attachments so you will see some big-sized emails and delete them to free your gmail account meanwhile!.
search for the following string : --> "has:attachment" will give you all the emails with attachments.
I hope it will help you.
zukinux
Read and Comment at my BLOG
!!!
I'm not sure many people care anyway.
The thing is, google started this and I loved them for it. They raised the bar to 1 gig out of nowhere and everyone rejoiced. It was long over due at the time as limits were far too low in general. Now, I'd guess they are reasonable for the vast majority. As long as google 'keeps up' at this point and accommodating its users, I'm not sure this is a bid deal.
In Gmail, there's "Download all attachments as Zip". And POP3. I don't know about them other mail services, but that seems pretty straightforward to me.
Of course livemail has no troubles as only 10% of the attachments get through anyway! Very usefull!
Codefile Defected to another Hexadimal Range refresh your CHAOSTACK.NLM file with a new copy
I find it amazing how people strive to have the most menial things secure. I don't honestly care.
The only email that should be secure is corporate email, and bank email, otherwise the encryption/decryption is just a waste of time and a pain to set up. Wasn't anybody taught about usability in comp class?
If it doesn't need to be secure, why on earth should it be. Banks and corporations usually run their own email systems anyway and throw security on them to make it hard for people to hack in. Though if absolutely no one cares about Joe Sixpack's email. What would he secure from? What is the purpose of all these wasted cpu cycles? If anything all it would do is make it harder for people to set up their email client right.
efficiency people!
Can you please post your e-mails from your Gmail account then? After all, you don't care about security do you?
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
What does Hotmail's limit matter when it won't deliver the bloody emails in the first place?
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
I don't take naked photos of myself, but if I did, I wouldn't e-mail them to myself, either.
Regardless, the answer to your question is that most people are simply that trusting. If it's a company, they think that they're going to do the Right Thing. They also don't understand that these services are constantly under attack by people either seeking thrills or trying to get valuable information.
Finally, people usually end up sending naked pictures of themselves to other people. In that case, you're always trusting third-parties that the pictures won't show up somewhere.
Also they don't do POP3, Google does but I never use it... I want a free e-mail service which supports IMAP, preferably over SSL. PLz k thnx.
I will use GMail when they implement IMAP. Webmail is a pile of shit, and POP is an even bigger pile.
all I am saying is that the security should match the importance of the contents being secure. No need to employ a high security situation on non valuable information, in fact that is just terrible design.
I eat trolls for breakfast.
How frustrating would it be to have your red hot ex girlfriend in a mail saying "i've attached the video of me wearing my Princess Leia outfit for you" and discover you fucking deleted it.
If she's my ex, then that means she's screwing somebody else by then
and the absolute LAST thing I want to be reminded of is any erotic
imagery of her, you insensitive clod!
And how is having e-mail stored locally instead of on an online account high security?
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
I did not mean to cast aspersions on the storage industry. They've worked extremely hard to create hardware-layer reliability and robust backup/restore processes because the fate of a storage company rests on reliability.
Instead, I'd argue that the more insidious type of fault would occur in the apps layer, probably during or after a Version++ migration. Creeping corruption in Yahoo/Microsoft/Google data structures would render the data backups only incrementally less corrupted than the production copy of the data. Unless these systems use a application layer journalling process that can roll-back and roll-forward all the user actions since the version migration, the corruption would cause data loss that no conventional storage system backup can recover from.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
> I find it astounding that people would so willing store so much personal information on the ... Is it because they're ignorant of the risks?
> servers of these companies.
Can you suggest anywhere to handling our mail in such a way that no risk is involved? For the starter, it is okay if you propose a system without the following risks: that of "mails leaking to somebody who shouldn't be able to read my mails", of "having to pay undue amount of money to just to make sure others can E-mail me", of "getting so much spam that we have to spend undue amount of time just to process inbox", of "not being able to find a mail even though I know it must be somewhere", and of "not being able to access my mailbox within a minute".
"Hands up who here uses gmail to the max?"
If you belong to various google and yahoo 'image' groups you can easily reach your max. For example, I used to get 5GB of images a day.
I'm not sure if gmail still does it, but when deleting via POP it wouldn't completely delete the mail. Thus I used Yahoo, who at the time only had a 1GB limit, and made sure I had a computer on that could retrieve my mail 24/7.
What is limiting you to ONE GMail account, if your first one is too full? It's not like they verify anything, if you're absolutely in love with GMail, and run out of space in free account #1, sign up for free account #2, and off you go, instant DOUBLE STORAGE. Yes, it's slightly inconvenient, but with auto-forwarding of all new mail to the new account enabled, and the ability to "send as" the old account #1 from #2 ... really not much of a problem.
well, one reason could be if the email sever for whatever reason fails to work, you still have all the copies. though I never said that email stored locally was any more secure than email on the online account or vise versa, so I have no idea where this is coming from.
that depends on if you define capitalism to be evil too...
I would like to see the ability to adjust the number of days to keep stuff in the spam folder... like down to zero days. Also would like to have blacklisting and whitelisting capability on my Gmail account. Also would like to have S/IMAP connection support too.
Unless you run your own mail server, the email has to be stored *somewhere*. Email (SMTP) isn't designed so that it works well on dynamic ip addresses , and with all the spam problems most ISP's have blocked port 25 for home users. you probably have to get another business line to run the server. Besides, you'll need a (sub)domain too, and not a lot of people have the knowledge to set up that either.
It would be nice if the Internet were much more "P2P" instead of relying on dedicated servers to relay content, but I'm afraid this will have to be the case until another major paradigm shift comes along (uh, web2.0 didn't really do it.)
Don't quote me on this.
It's a trade-off, really. I could run my own e-mail server, but as I don't have a lot of redundancy at home this isn't likely to work out well. I could use my organization's e-mail system, but the quota is relatively small, and at some point I'm going to leave, and making e-mail archives has rarely worked out for me in the past. I could pay for e-mail service somewhere, but then I have to think about what I'm going to do when I want to stop paying or they go out of business. I use GMail because it's relatively unlikely to lose all my e-mail, I can use it anywhere, no real quota limit, and I can quickly find nearly every e-mail I've ever sent or received since the service started. A friend of mine recently asked if I still had our final project from Intro to Software Engineering, and though it had been long gone from my PC due to drive failure and from my organizational disk space due to limited disk quota, it was still in my GMail archive. Of course, if Google tanks or goes completely over to the dark side I'll probably regret not leaving it sooner, but I'll burn that bridge when I come to it.
Here's the conversation laid out for you easily:
AC - I can't believe people are willing to have e-mails stored online.
You - "I find it amazing how people strive to have the most menial things secure. I don't honestly care."
Me - "If you don't care about security, post your e-mails publicly."
You - "I care about security, just the level of security shouldn't be that high"
Me - "How is having stuff stored locally instead of online a high amount of security?"
Now you might be confused about that last point however if you see the OP's point about how e-mails shouldn't be stored online. The only other option is to store it locally.
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
The biggest problem with online services in general, and Gmail specifically, is that companies keep trying to impose arbitrary confines on them.
You know why GMail can't add space fast enough? Because they don't have a Yahoo Briefcase type service, with a nice interface, where people can directly store and manage their files, and more than that, directly SHARE a file with an unlimited number of other users. Instead, somebody hacks up a program, and your files get stuffed into an e-mail with all the overhead, and thousands of people have their own private copies of the same damn file.
Such a service might not be profitable on its own, but it might just make up the difference, thanks to saving them tons of money from not having to keep upgrading their mail servers that have been picking up the slack for people that need such a service.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I often find myself wanting to keep the mail and delete the attachment. Why is it not possible to delete attached files from an email in gmail?
The limit is getting CLOSE!
If "that data" is important, it's scary that someone would e-mail it at all. The fact that it's stored on Google's servers is so minor as to be a non-issue.
Unless you run your own SMTP server, it's at least being temporarily held for you by some company, who could also indefinitely archive it if they chose. And even if you do run your own server, don't start getting a false sense of security, because everything you send or receive is still going over a dozen companies' lines, in clear text.
Or maybe they're even smarter than you, and either encrypt such info, or simply don't transfer such important info ANYWHERE across the internet to begin with.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Well, I do run my own server and there are many ways to get around a port 25 block. At the moment, I use No-IP's alternate-port mail service for SMTP. The server tries to send the message directly to the destination server if it can, but since many ISPs won't accept mail from a non-static IP, if that fails it falls back and sends the message out through No-IP's server on a different port. Works extremely well, and I haven't had an outgoing message go through my ISP's mail server in years.
For incoming mail, my domain hosting company points their MX records directly at my server, using a dynamic DNS lookup in case my IP address changes, so the sending host just sends the mail directly to my machine. Never passes through anyone else's mail system that way. No I'm not very trusting.
A distributed mail system would be very interesting, wouldn't it? I mean, given what's been shown to be possible with the Gnutella protocol and the distributed hash table techniques in modern Bit Torrent clients, a truly distributed email system could be very effective. More to the point, it would be very much in line with the way the IP network was supposed to be used, for reliable command and control. Anything centralized is a point of failure, from either the reliability or security perspectives.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The "capacities" Microsoft and Yahoo and Google are providing are not comparable values. That's because they're all overcommitted quotas, calculated by assuming that the majority of users aren't going to take advantage of them and only turning up actual hardware to back them up when the window between the actually used and actually available storage gets too low.
When you don't have that many of your users taking advantage of a facility, it's easy to provide big quotas.
So all you're doing when you compare Hotmail and Yahoo to GMail here is pointing out that Yahoo and Hotmail have a smaller percentage of their users taking advantage of their quota, for whatever reason.
If all the Email that was encrypted was the "good-stuff" then all the encrypted Email would be the Good-stuff. I don't care if they crack encryption on aunt sally's email chain letter, but if they are going to spend 2 CPU decades cracking an encryption, I'd rather it be Aunt Sally's Email chain-letter. I bet you even drive the same way to and from work each day, irregularity makes the Bad-guys(Tm) crazey; shred a few newspaper each time you shread a sensitive document too!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Finally, people usually end up sending naked pictures of themselves to other people. In that case, you're always trusting third-parties that the pictures won't show up somewhere.
That's what this guy thought too, but if you happen to recognize Vico Interpol would like to talk to him about what he likes to do to little boys.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
...one either deals with that, or one does not.
The slightly smarter Netizen will encrypt those things that might be bad. Ideally, they will keep them of the net period.
As for the rest, who really cares?
It comes down to how much of a target you are and what kinds enemies one has to deal with. Most ordinary people have few worries, so the service is viable on that basis.
If you've got any worries:
(and here is a starter list)
-sexual wierdness
-crime
-pissed powerful people
-sedition
-activism
you would be wise to just deal with these things, person to person, or maybe run your own stuff, but that comes with risks too. Likely the same, or even more risk than just blending into the online crowd does.
The one other thing that can be done is to just get smart about the net, generally speaking. The more you know, the safer you are. Safe computing is a matter of what you know and what your habits are like. Has nothing to do with software and services, for the most part.
Blogging because I can...
In fact, I received my set of obsidian knives *with* my Hotmail Upgrade.
Act now, operators are standing by.
Quantity is not quality.
Google has a really good quality webmail with helpful options. It has everything of a true quality mail server. It is probably the best free webmail.
Windows live on the other hand provides the worst quality webmail I have ever seen, many (most?) mails are lost, error messages are deleted, help is a pay us $1200 to valid you will have a hope the help services may try to help you. So while they may have more space to offer, it is years behind gmail in terms of quality.
Yahoo seems a good quality webmail, but still inferior to gmail.
I gave up with the idea of an useful sig...
And yet, you can store more mail on your Yahoo and Hotmail account than on Gmail. What's your point?
It's funny how some people really think they need all this information stored forever when they hardly go back and look at it. These probably are the same people who park their cars in the driveway because they garages are filled up with junk they accumulated over their lives but can't bear to throw out.
It's subtle messages like this that piss off people "No conversations in the Trash. Who needs to delete when you have over 2000 MB of storage?!" Now, I'm forced to label emails with large attachments from now on. PS: Its darn easy to fill up any given space. -- Malcolm (in the middle): I have social skills, jackass!
I've been using gmail almost since launch and I've been pretty frugal with the space.
On the other hand, we signed my grandmother up for gmail a year ago. She gets so many forwarded messages and the like that she is using up ALL of the space now. Apparently she really likes receiving them, too...
And don't get me started on how hard it is to sort through those thousands of messages to pick out the ones that are OK to delete. GMail's "search, not sort" mentality just doesn't work for Grandma. I can't sort by size and delete the top offenders. There's no way to search for large messages that she didn't reply to so I can just get rid of the top ones of those, either. Frustrating.
It's personality trait #4b in "End Users: A Guide to Understanding Immense Stupidity".
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
Yeah but my main point was... you can't expect everybody to have sophisticated servers configured as you do.
The perceived "risk" of email solution providers confiscating your emails is pretty low, and the costs that it takes for an average person to have their own mail servers is just way higher than that risk. That's why (almost) everybody just uses gmail, yahoo, hotmail, etc for normal stuff.
Though, I'd personally manage my own mail server instead of using google if my ISP hadn't blocked INCOMING port 25....
Don't quote me on this.
I use my (PAID) yahoo account more than gmail because of this.
At least let me make rules to redirect my spam folder content to my inbox, or let me access the spam folder from my email client. I hate having to log on via a browser and wade through the spam folder because I might find an important message in there (and I often do).
In this area, I and many others find gmail sadly lacking, and their silence on the matter in response to queries is truly baffling.
Nothing is inexplicable; only unexplained -Tom Baker, Doctor Who
Of course "Unlimited Mail Storage" is an overcommitted quota. At least until they invent INFINITE drives.
What they are saying is that as users increase their storage, they will expand their storage to accommodate. What more do you want?
I find it astounding that people would so willing store so much personal information on the servers of these companies. I don't care if we're talking about Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, or some other company. It's just damn scary to think that so many people would just give out all that data.
I've got a bunch of money in a bank account. One arithmetic error and years of hard work are wiped out. Is that damn scary, too? Are you a cash-under-mattress guy?
Most people don't give a shit because they don't have much to hide...
Data's safety is about having a backup, which is what I thought your post would be about. It is surprising that someone would have 2GB of mostly irreplacable data stored on someone else's machine, to which you pay nothing for the service. On the other hand, e-mail is sent from machine to machine in the clear, so anything you send is probably intercepted already. Even if you have your e-mail program "delete" the message from the server, who says it really gets deleted anyway?
Those limits at Powweb are just for advertising. You will never be allowed to transfer 3 terabytes each month, apparently.
Also, Powweb is lacking in professionalism, in my experience.
Maybe A2hosting would be better, but I haven't tried them.
They released the fonts under a license which allowed redistribution. Which people are continuing to do, per the terms of the license. See here to download, if you're not using debian: http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/ Or, review the license here: http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fontpack/eula.htm
> Unlikely to see it.
:)
you'll be surprised
Yes, it saves lots of space.
What's evil is promoting capitalism as a panacea. It's just one of many sub-optimal arrangements for managing scarcity.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty
To the extent that Google has "forced" the industry in this respect, it helps users, and it helps Google. People want more storage, and Google is smart to provide it. If there are enough people who feel that they really need a ton of storage, they will follow the provider that offers it.
Someone like me, on the other hand, who finds 2GB to be more way more than enough, will hit a point where they are not inclined to switch to, say, Yahoo! Mail, from the great feature set of gmail, simply for more storage. If the user doesn't feel the benefit, no amount of extra storage will steal them away.
If I'm in the minority, and the reality is that most people just want more, and more, and more storage, then those users will follow the big storage provider, and the remaining providers will continue to try to catchup by offering more storage to get the eyeballs.
Oh, I agree. Let's face it, the bulk of Internet users couldn't configure themselves out of the bathroom, and that's probably okay: most people will never have a privacy problem because their "confidential communications" are of no interest to anyone but themselves. Those of us that do wish to maintain our privacy should take the proper steps. It's all matter of what risks you're comfortable taking. I have a GMail account because it's an interesting application, but I don't use it for anything consequential.
... but that's no reason to make it easy for them. I mean, why help make your typical government fishing expedition fruitful? And let's not forget non-governmental privacy risks: just ask the good folks at Media Defender how they are feeling about GMail right about now.
More to the point, nothing is secure from government snooping if they're really out to get you
Storing all your confidential materials on a remote server that is not physically under your control is just asking for trouble. It is a risk I choose not to take. Unfortunately, I think you're right: the perceived risk of commercial providers (which has absolutely nothing to do with the real risk, whatever that might be) isn't very high.
Check out No-IP anyway. Their services aren't free, but they're inexpensive, and in the past four or five years I've used them they've been rock-solid. They might have a solution to your incoming Port 25 problem.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Maybe you've noticed the advertising that they put on the page...
However their larger attachment acceptance policy (20MB) seems to support the original posters argument that they want you to fill up your mailbox faster...
Grab yourself FireGPG - http://firegpg.sourceforge.net/ - and encrypt the problem away.
catch (HumourFailureException e) { e.user.send("You, sir, are a humourless idiot."); }
You always have the choice between storing things locally, or storing things remotely to allow remote access. Sometimes access to information is more important than the security of that information: carrying a laptop or email db on a portable drive is not as convenient as being able to access email from any Internet-connected terminal.
The only way to prevent servers from storing your data is to use POP download and delete.
The current rate of increase seems to be 1.24 Gigs per day, so I don't think they'll be lagging very much longer... or that you'll run out of space again very soon...
Gmail is a great and useful mail client, but I'm not running up against account limits so much as I am running up against attachment size limits. Email attachments are limited to 10MB, which is far too puny IMO. When I want to send the pictures of my cousin's wedding to him, I would like to be able to set him up with a gmail account, and give him the pass keys. Trying to help my family understand .rar or .torrents is impossible, but they can readily access an email account and get their data.
--why?
Well said; You must either encrypt your data, or accept the possibility that suitably well-connected middlemen can see it. SMTP is not SSH.
Isn't that what we all assumed about "unlimited" bandwidth as recently as three or four years ago?
What, me? Never.
I'm not so concerned about the total storage limit.
I want them to increase the individual file size limit. 10 mb is ridiculous.
Does anybody know how the numbers add up? I mean if Google has 100 million very active users with a 3GB limit and Yahoo has 10 million users who are largley inactive, with no limit, the comparision doesn't really work.
/.er just leave everything there for reference. Heck I have a firefox addon to effectively use a second GMail account as an FTP dumping ground for core PDF, Word and Excel files I may need if my house burns down. So I have a GMail account with 226 MB used, I have a second Google Data account that is 2.5 GB and I have a Yahoo account that is about 25 MB. So Yahoo, which I don't really use anymore can feel safer giving me and unlimited amount of space. Although, come to think about it I should see if I could find a yahoo Firefox addon that lets me dump my core files there, without and concern for how big it gets, just make folders for month/year and do full backups every month. Head spinning with idea, must investigate.
I am going to google it now, but the interesting thing to find out is:
1). How much actual storage do Yahoo!, Google and MS have.
2). How many total users do the all have.
3). User stats like average mailbox usage, how many users have logged on in the last 60 days, etc.
I would think that given that Hotmail and Yahoo at one point had tight limits, it could be that their users are more tailored or trained to mailbox cleanup, whereas I being a lazy
Respect the Constitution
After about 40 months of usage, I'm only using 571 MB. I can't blame Gmail for being too small. I can blame it for lacking a whole bunch of features though: -Grouping emails by sender(for cleanup) -Displaying more than 100 emails per page and more than 20 results per search (20 results is really pathetic and insufficient) -Doing a poor job at managing signatures when using one gmail account to manage multiple email accounts (forwarding and pop). Only one signature can be had per gmail account. -Not supporting MS exchange (It's proprietary but it's also dominant and should be taken into account. A lot of people use gmail to handle work emails, me included and can't do it effectively when the company uses exchange server). Only forwarding is possible and that messes things up royally. -and the list goes on and on. I'm disappointed because I did submit lots of feedback and small requests to the gmail team and never got an answer or saw them implemented. Not even displaying more than 100/20 emails per page which should be trivial. That said, I do love Gmail, it's just not as good as it can be.
It's free.
It's low maintenance.
It's accessible everywhere.
There are only 24 hours in the day. People have enough of a hard time just trying to juggle their obligations, free time and personal projects (eating well, exercising, spending time with the kids..)
all I want to do is make a couple of damn folders.
Labels are nice and all, but for simplicity a *folder*...you know, I don't see the mail in
my inbox...something simple and understandable?
Maybe actually "sortable".
Hotmail had it right, in that respect, but Hotmail's stupid, fucking, "you must login every
month or less" bullshit is what made me drop them. Well, fed up and dropped them after a
visit to my former box got "site maint, try later"...there was no later w/o "oh, sorry
your mail is gone, but you can keep your email address". Stupid fucking assholes.
Gmail: no folders, 9 months to check mail, huge storage. If I can't remember to login in that
time, well death, coma or whatever, I think remembering to check my mail is the least of
my worries, eh?
Hotmail...err..Live mail: folders, pathetic, now "unlimited" (until they change/charge) and
I'd imagine the 1 month limit and *boom* your inbox is gone despite it being their error.
Hummm...which one to pick? The roomy electronic prision, or the small cell with sadistic,
uncaring guards (complete with windows logos/badges)?
Tough choice.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
I watched the GMail storage space counter for 1 minute, noting the starting and ending numbers. Then I typed this into Google:
(3113.335029 - 3113.246785) MB/minute * 1 year
= 45.3240458 gigabytes
If the counter really keeps moving at this pace, those prices for extra storage are going to seem pretty steep.
It should obviate the need for a 'delete attachments' button or sorting by size, though.
I understand the distinction you're trying to draw between "ad-supported" and "free," but when something is free-of-charge in the same sense as FM radio and broadcast TV are, I don't expect average people to see a conflict.
Maybe we need a new term for things that are free-like-Craigslist?
Pi Ran Out
I'm a hardware geek but a few years ago I jumped the fence into marketing. Before I jumped off the IT wagon I would be hard up using 2GB of space but now my email archive is over 30GB of customer files, general emails, product information, legal files, internal memo's, details sent to customers. When your dealing with customers on the coal face it is wise move to keep a copy of all correspondence unless you can remember thousands of names, numbers and were you last left. So saying "I only use 500mb" is irrelevant unless you talk to those who depend on their email archive as part of their job.
I have 3115 MBs and the next reply will have more. Now shush :P
When ideas fail, words become very handy.
And yet, you can store more mail on your Yahoo and Hotmail account than on Gmail. What's your point?
The point is that hardly anyone bothers to take advantage of the available storage on Yahoo and Hotmail, so it's easier for them to set their quotas higher than it is for Google, so the implication that somehow this implied Google was doing an inferior job is churlish.
it only goes up while your watching it, noob.
Go create some throwaway accounts and use GmailFS.
There are 11 types of people, those who know unary and those who don't.
[citation needed]
How can you tell the difference between "refusing" to add the option and simply having higher priorities? As a director of a development team, I can tell you, it can be awfully hard to do everything everyone could ever want. And everyone thinks you're snubbing them because their feature didn't make it to the top of the list...
Not saying Google hasn't refused, but if so, I would like to see some kind of communication from Google saying "No, we won't add this feature."
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
1and1 gives me 2GB of storage, Webmail, and IMAP access for $0.99/month. That's pretty cheap for IMAP support. Their support isn't the greatest, but I rarely have had to contact them. So far, it "just works."
But...you are trusting everyone you send emails to and from to not forward them, not to have a court demand access to their data, not have their login credentials compromised, etc. And you are trusting their email providers and their ISPs and the ISPs' backbone providers, etc. not to sniff your packets (chuckle). In fact, the only thing you are bypassing is your ISP's mail server. You aren't even bypassing their network. So, unless you are encrypting all network traffic from end to end, pretty much anywhere in the chain is a point of easy compromise. You probably should just get a cheap but solid VPS (GrokThis/VPS Village, Server Axis, Quantact, etc.) and move your mail setup there. It will be as secure as what you have now, but you no longer have to worry about hardware or having your net block on every RBL because you have a dynamic IP.
You didn't actually read my message, did you. I'm not disputing any of your points: I considered all of that when setting up my mail system but my own needs aren't that critical. What we are discussing in this thread is whether or not it's wise to leave one's personal communications permanently on a system such as GMail, where they would be subject to any security breaches or law-enforcement requests that come down the line. The intent of my system is to have my mail go from my own server directly to the receiving host. That's not always possible: it's why I fail back to the No-IP alternate-port service if the remote refuses the transmission ... that doesn't happen very often, but it eliminates any concern about RBLs. However, in either case I bypass my ISP's server, so anyone poking around on that system will find nothing. I also found out that my ISPs mail service is unreliable, which was another good reason to go around it. In any event, I'm not concerned about someone sniffing packets, I just don't want a collection of my personal emails sitting on someone else's hard disk forever. I think that's a bad idea.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The evil part is not being upfront about it. The typical user will only realize this too late, when 1 GB of one's past is locked-up at Google, with no easy way to get it back --- I'm talking about the average user here.
no, i use newbienudes.com for that :P
I've recently been very disappointed by the GMail Service. I love their search feature and wanted to use GMail for one of my new business e-mail account. But sending e-mail from Google is practically shooting yourself in the foot since they insert an "Sender:" header disclosing the gmail address (add weird behavior of outlook regarding this header and you get a PR disaster).
The attachment handling of GMail is also sub-par. For instance I lost html attachments to e-mails sent with thunderbird.
I am not going to need capacity if they continue to fail on core features.
I fill 3-5 gmail accounts every month. Not for mailing, of course. I use them for sharing files using programs like http://www.peer2mail.com/.
to stop deleting very important incoming (non-spam) emails.
can't use gmail for business any more.
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
...how about fixing the error resulting in a nondescript "please try again" Javascript box every (9 out of 10) time I try to send a mail through the service using Firefox 2.0.0.7 on Comcast? (It works fine in Firefox 2.0.0.7 at work.) Then fix the attachment bug that pops up when I switch to IE in desperation? Haven't debugged what the exact trouble is yet (good luck with that), but the service seems to be quickly becoming the Myspace of webmail :-(
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
So you could encrypt messages and send them to Gmail, but when it came time to get a message out, you'd have to go into Gmail and send it to your regular desktop account for decryption (or copy the encrypted text out some other way) before you could do it. That strikes me as somewhat inconvenient, compared to other backup options.
If Gmail offered IMAP you could do some pretty slick stuff, because then you could use a GPG-aware desktop client to browse the encrypted messages stored on Gmail's servers, decrypting on-the-fly to browse, but with only POP access you're more limited.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Just frelling give me IMAP already!
IIRC, we didn't have all these problems when we delivered mail on horseback. :)
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Encrypted I suppose.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
We eventually "pay" for those "free" resources by seeing those ads.
Companies give google money to display ads. Google displays those ads to us in their products. We use those products that we like to use and see those ads.
We need to want to use those products, so they should cater to our needs if they want to continue to receive revenue for showing those ads.
You are currently using 1765 MB (52%) of your 3369 MB. minwe is currently 52% of the capacity and it generally stays close to 50%.