Google Vows to Increase Gmail Limit 309
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
myself after 2 years im only using ~500MB
Re:hands up (Score:5, Funny)
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I've been using Gmail since the early days, but I've only used ~300MB. If someone sends me a photo I want to keep, I put it in my photo library. If someone sends a video, it goes into the video library. Documents go into one of a number of document folders. If I didn't do this, I think I'd probably be near, if not over, the limit.
Just keep things neat and organized, and use email to store email, and the current limits shouldn't be a real problem. At least that's my exp
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I offer my share of gmail space for charity (Score:2)
Re:hands up (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:hands up (Score:5, Insightful)
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I am currently using 1424 MB (46%) of your 3069 MB.
Re:hands up (Score:5, Funny)
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My limit is at 2993.
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Re:hands up (Score:4, Funny)
Someone who looses. I'm not sure what they loose, though. Probably spam.
Hey! Stop loosing your spam in my direction, you jerks!
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I'm guessing they'd have to be under a LOT of pressure to make storage "unlimited" because of all the people that would very quickly devour that using gmail-drive programs. Personally, I think I would just install Ubuntu on gmail-drive and never worry about space aga
Re:hands up (Score:4, Funny)
myself after 2 years im only using ~500MB
Well, maybe it's because you don't have friends or relatives that send you stupid videos and pictures.
I regret the day I trained my mother-in-law how to attach things to emails. I may have to show her how to find things on Youtube or how to upload and link to them on Youtube.
Or maybe just break her PC and tell her it can't be fixed........
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I don't do a lot of attachments, so I guess that's how I manage to weigh in so low.
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I've been doing this for two years, and I'm up to 66Mb. I delete obsolete backups after six months.
I don't have a large set of old mail either, with few exceptions I delete it.
Re:hands up (Score:5, Insightful)
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Don't know if Spam is counted, but there's just over 4500 spam emails in the spam folder.
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You pay $60/year for your domain registration? You might want to shop around a bit...
(Unless you know of an actual hosting company offering unlimited space and bandwidth for $5/mo, in which case, where do I sign up?)
Re:hands up (Score:4, Interesting)
Most importantly, I have IMAP. I'd been bouncing between gmail and my own domain's mail for some time, but having finally set up IMAP through my host and not having that option with gmail, my solution is just to forward * to my IMAP'd domain.
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I use my gmail account for the printer repair mailing list I'm a member of. Really haven't used it for much else (I'm too used to having folders. I don't like the "label" system, especially because every message comes in with the "General" label and, thus far, I haven't been able to fi
Re:hands up (Score:5, Insightful)
Passed up, nothing (Score:5, Funny)
Yahoo mail isn't unlimited. (Score:2, Interesting)
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And they don't do POP3 anyway. (Score:2)
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Re:Yahoo mail isn't unlimited. (Score:4, Informative)
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Yahoo's not my main account, but after a few years I can say that GMail is WAY better at blocking spam.
I must get 200 spams in my Yahoo inbox each month.
With GMail, I get about 12 spams a month, and once in a while (rarely) a false positive such as a newsletter landing in the spam folder.
With Yahoo, I never bother to check my Spam folder because the spam filters are so weak, why bother?
Why don't people care about their data's safety? (Score:5, Interesting)
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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
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That's what this guy thought too, but if you happen to recognize Vico [google.com] Interpol would like to talk to him about what he likes to do to little boys.
Re:Why don't people care about their data's safety (Score:2)
It would be nice if the Internet were much more "P2P" instead of relying on dedicated servers to relay conten
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For incoming mai
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Re:Why don't people care about their data's safety (Score:2)
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
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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
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it's true! (Score:5, Funny)
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just one new feature (Score:5, Interesting)
other than that i cannot fault the service. i get my email at work, home and on my phone with no hassles. thanks google!
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Consider however that you are reading that same (now sanitised) mail a few months later.
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 you want the feature so badly, forward it to yourself and exclude the attachment or just delete the whole mail.
Ex (Score:2)
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!
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you know how gmail threads emails together, ones with similar subjects, so that if you got 12 emails from friends replying to "all" one day, when you check it, you only have one email, with all those posts in it?
i want to be able to connect emails together myself...sort of a manual threading ability. sometimes conversations happen over the course of several weeks, the subject gets changed, so looking for one specific email is difficult cos it may have been under the "
Re:just one new feature (Score:5, Interesting)
as for your red hot ex girlfriend in a Princess Leia, check usenet.
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Re:just one new feature (Score:5, Funny)
I've known dozens of people what "worked" at Google, and they all say it's just one big party. The only people that work are the low-paid ad sales crew - the ones responsible for 99.9% of last quarter's revenue.
If it doesn't sell ads, noone works on it.
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On a similar vein, I would like to have a feature where you could download the attachments for multiple emails. Then I wouldn't have to look at each email to download my attachments.
Some more needed features (Score:2)
Hotmail fails to trans,it attachments... (Score:2, Interesting)
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There fixed it for you.
Single point of failure + high value target (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Single point of failure + high value target (Score:5, Informative)
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?
Backup/restore: hardware vs. app layer faults (Score:2)
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
People don't back up anyways. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Single point of failure + high value target (Score:5, Insightful)
Compared to the atrocious data security and safeguards most home users have (which is to say, none), having the pros at google or hotmail take care of it is a huge step up. At least they don't put it all on one drive with no backup or accidentally throw it away when they get a new computer.
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Probably every one of them.
If the worst problem you have from an event of major data loss, is being forced to input some metadata, you can count yourself as damn lucky.
As opposed to storing everything locally? I know lots of people that have lost lots of data when their local system was ruined thanks to viru
DVD service next? (Score:3, Interesting)
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!!!
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http://mail.google.com/mail/help/paper/more.html [google.com]
I don't get it (Score:2)
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
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Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Hotmail isn't a good comparison (Score:4, Informative)
Problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
They surpassed it because (Score:5, Insightful)
Who even wants to use something else? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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People who don't want to worry about XSS vulnerabilities [slashdot.org]?
People who don't want to worry about stolen session cookies?
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Who even wants to use something else than Gmail?
Me. If you read Google's Privacy Policy (who does that? I know, simply shocking) they've given themselves permission to create profiles based on every single e-mail that has ever gone through your inbox (as well as information form any other services you use with your Gmail account). They can then use this to send even more ads to you or even sell it. Personally I value my privacy a bit more then that, so I'm phasing out my use of Google.
Great, gotta love competition (Score:2)
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.
google wants users to reach limit and pay up (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:google wants users to reach limit and pay up (Score:5, Insightful)
IMAP (Score:2, Insightful)
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Webmail and pop suck on mobile devices.
Am I missing something here? (Score:5, Insightful)
Briefcase... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Delete attachments? (Score:2, Insightful)
The limit is getting CLOSE!
False comparison between GMail and other services. (Score:2, Interesting)
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 Ho
Re:False comparison between GMail and other servic (Score:4, Insightful)
What they are saying is that as users increase their storage, they will expand their storage to accommodate. What more do you want?
You are currently using 225 MB (7%) (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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- especially since the email providers made downloading multiple photos such a pain (I think this is done on purpose as Yet Another Lock-In).
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Or because, you know, they never intended to be your photo repository.
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Re:A tip on how to clean-up your GMail meanwhile! (Score:5, Insightful)
Gmail search has been wonderful, so I use it for searching messages, and use Thunderbird for reading mails.
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