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."
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?)
Speaking as a storage engineer working for a vendor used by one their competitors (The Goog uses us too, but not for Gmail afaik) the answer is yes.
A couple of months ago there was a failed raid group which housed 200,000 mailboxes, which was restored with only a loss of 15 seconds of email.
Not bad for free, eh?
Goofy, Geeky Gifts and More!
I'm a journalist. I get lots of email from publicity types, many of which include print-ready imagery (which can be as much as several megabytes in size). I get email from freelance writers, which often includes attached .DOC files of stories and/or invoices. (I know, I know -- I'm nuts to be using Microsoft Word when emacs would do the job with less overhead.) I try to regularly delete the largest, least necessary email from my box, but in truth what I really like about Gmail is the ability to keep everything. For one thing, it works as a great PR photo archive with next to no effort required on my part. For another, it's a poor man's backup system -- I actually trust it more than the one my office IT department provides, which has failed me in the not-too-distant past. Anyway, I'm at 1209 MB and growing.
Email attachments are obsolete? Get out of town. I happily use FTP as much as possible, of course, but email attachments are, bar none, the easiest, fastest way to communicate with publicity agents and other journalists, not all of whom are Internet savvy. Yes, there are occasional issues where attachments are munged -- or legitimate attachments get snared in our corporate spam filter -- but those annoyances are far outweighed by the relative convenience of not having to teach every single person I deal with by email on a daily basis how to download and use FTP clients.