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?
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cpu0: Microsoft Clippium ("GenuineClippy" ChromedMetal-Class). Paperbinding, lockpicking, fish-hook-hack support.
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!
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.
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
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
Or maybe they'll send you hard-copies for free:
http://mail.google.com/mail/help/paper/more.html
It would have been really nice to have a "search by attachment, with size > X" option... This way, we can delete huge attachments first. Often, in Thunderbird, I sort by size and keep moving large messages to another folder.
Gmail search has been wonderful, so I use it for searching messages, and use Thunderbird for reading mails.
S
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.
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.
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'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.
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?
MS does not offer their core fonts pack on their website anymore.