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."

Comments

Why don't people care about their data's safety?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

just one new feature

[DMoylan]

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!

Re:just one new feature

[budgenator]

What I've always wondered is why Google doesn't just figure out a way to delete duplicates and keep one attachment for each Email to use, just think of how much space they could save by just storing one Cutsie picture of kittens playing with yarn instead of one for everyone in Aunt Millie's Email List.
  as for your red hot ex girlfriend in a Princess Leia, check usenet.

Single point of failure + high value target

[G4from128k]

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.