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! /
\
\
\ ____
\ / __ \
\ O| |O|
|| | |
|| | |
|| |
|___/
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.
``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.
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.