Gmail Users Get A Storage Boost [updated]

Faies writes "As reported by ZDNet: Not to be outdone by Lycos, Google just upped its 1,000 megabyte accounts to 1,000,000 MB. I just recently checked my inbox, and the number at the bottom confirms this. "You are currently using 12 MB (0%) of your 1000000 MB." That's more than my hard drive...and plus, Google clearly wants to hold the title of being best, so who knows what will happen if someone else tries to compete with a terabyte." Now how much would you pay? Update: 05/19 13:34 GMT by T : Several comments to this thread indicate that the listed mailbox size limit has returned to the previous 1GB level, so this apparent change may be nothing more than the result of a misplaced decimal point.

Re:time to ebay my account

I wonder now, if this wasn't the plan in the first place... To get people to buy stocks. First give them free Gig email, then give them a little piece of what they can really give little by little, so people will crave to buy...
They are not really in the email business (yet). Searching seems their main business as of now. And they pay that with advertising only? I know they have the brainpower of some of the brightiest geeks out there. But surely they must have a better skeem of somekind to give (freely) that much email space. I mean my last hardrive cost me 200$ US and I got 40 Gig...

I'm really starting to think that this much altruism is really gonna profite some few people.
Or they have found a hole in the thin layer of space and time, and manage to be able to give without any real return on investment (ROI).

Call me paranoid, call me non-believer, believe me I WANT to believe. But nothing on earth is free. People don't give unless, they get something in return. Unless they want to polish they're image. (Like Micro$oft with Hotmail. Theyre less evil, cause they give free emails)
But Google does'nt need a better image, they are the image. The best search engine ever in human history( for now ). I think they're in for the money.

Re:time to ebay my account

I'm currently working on a linux file system driver that uses google email boxes. Performance isn't that great, but I'm working on that. I can already tell that fsck.google is gonna be a bitch.

Re:time to ebay my account

> Who's going to use a terabyte of hard drive space?

I could use it. For one thing, I'm an email packrat, and only delete my yahoo mail when I'm out of space. But a 1TB account would be useful for so much more than email. I think of it as free web-based storage. If I could get my hands on a free-for-life 1TB gmail account, I would whip up some code to encrypt and store arbitrary information as gmail messages. With the privacy concerns regarding gmail, encryption would be a necessity for using gmail in this fashion. A proper interface would allow gmail to look like an encrypted, web-based file system.

Also, it appears that there is a 10MB limit per message. No problem, just treat gmail as a harddrive with variable block sizes, up to 10MB. Storing larger files would simply mean splitting the file across multiple messages.

Re:time to ebay my account

Exactly. You aren't the average user. And what the average user doesn't use in their accounts, you'll use in yours.

Re:time to ebay my account

Looks like just one more reason to get top dollar when I auction my account ;)

Slashdot I hate you!!!!!

Everytime slashdot runs the freakin' gmail story it DRIVES UP the price.

Just when things begin to cool off, THERE IS another slashdot story!!

Either stop it, or I start posting Soviet Russia jokes again -- YOUR CHOICE!

Question

Whats the largest size mail you can send/receive with GMail?

Re:Question

Strange.

I still see 1GB in my account, which it still says in the FAQ.

The faq also says a maximum of 10MB per message.

Re:Question

The article mentions that so far only a few users are testing the 1,000,000 MB limit.

It never hurts to read the actual article.

Re:Question

It never hurts to read the actual article.

you must be new here...

Re:Question

The problem is that the moment you comment on the newness factor, someone else with a lower UID responds to you. Just watch....

Re:Question

I've been here so long my ID is binary.

Re:Question

"It never hurts to read the actual article."

Can't, Google's Slashdottted.

Re:Question

Just check out the google cach-- .. er.. oh ya. never mind.

Bigger != better

Honestly, what use does one have for such a large mailbox? I'm afraid to think what will happen if this would go live without too much restrictions. The warez guys would be all over this. Then it will be cut & cut until it's basically useless (look at what say geocities have had to do to curb piracy). Still, i'd like to get an account when it goes live (and any storage above say, 1G isn't useful to me.)

Re:Bigger != better

The use will make itself apparant someday.

Sure, my mailbox is well under 10 MB, even with my thousands of emails. And even the 6-10 MB limits at most webmail sites are plenty storage for the average person.

But all it takes is that *one* time you need to recieve a 5-10 MB Email attachment from soemone, and it is something important, and your provider barfs on you to totally have you screaming for blood.

The biggest benefit this increased storage has is the ability to recieve larger attachments.

Re:Bigger != better

You're missing a key point: Space is not the only issue. I have over 300 offline emails that I have archived over the years that I would LOVE to get imported into Gmail. Mainly, these are emails such as product registrations, "memorable" emails from family and friends, and a myriad of tidbits that I've saved over the years. By leveraging Gmail's extended capacity as well as its excellent Search and Label functionality, I could more efficiently manage these archived emails and new emails far better than I can now, and I could keep them online for instant access. Only added capacity AND functionality makles this possible.

Re:Bigger != better

Even routinely changing passwords monthly or so and only notifying paying members.

Any asshole could change the password and not tell anyone, and/or delete any or all files. And you know there are lots of jerks who love to do stuff like that. So you could only use this amongst a small trusted group.

Re:Whoa?

I think that's the whole POINT. Google is marketing gmail as something where you will NEVER EVER have to delete email, even if you use it for 80 years.

Pretty dang cool marketing tactic, if you ask me.

Re:Whoa?

I think that's the whole POINT. Google is marketing gmail as something where you will NEVER EVER have to delete email, even if you use it for 80 years.

Am I the only one who recall Altavista and Netscape promising "e-mail for life"?? Both e-mail services are gone, now...

Might just be a fluke

Sounds like employee's get 1 Tb and their might have been a mix up and regualr people where giving this much. Some that reported haveing 1 Tb are now reporting to be back down to 1 Gb. Fun while it lasted I guess :/

This is excellent

I recently got my entire hard drive wiped out when I messed up a Debian install. Some of my recent important documents were saved on my email account, but the old ones got lost.

This is great news from Google. If I had a terabyte of storage accessible from anywhere I'd hardly use my harddrive at all.

Has Google published APIs to GMail yet? I'd love to rewire OpenOffice's save function through Evolution so it stores it right on my GMail address.

Re:This is excellent

"I was just clobbered hard by having no backups, but if I had storage elsewhere I'd use that instead and still have no backups"? I think that's a fair summary of what you said.

This just in:

Attachments are limited to 100kb.

Kidding...

But they are obviously joking. They'll likely just assign a team to target the top 5 percent of users who use the most space. My whole mail file from the past year is under a gig because people simply can't send large attachments from most accounts.

Anyone know what the email attachment size limit is?

Re:This just in:

After clicking on 'Compose Mail,' just click on 'Attach a file.' At that point, you'll be able to browse the files on your computer and add your attachment. Once you've selected a file to attach, click the 'Open' button and that file will be added to your message. You will see the path of your file listed just below the subject field. If you'd like to get rid of the attachment, just click 'remove.' With Gmail, you can send and receive messages with a maximum total size of 10MB.

offsite backup.

gmail filesystem anyone?

dump 0f /dev/gmailfs /home

Spam

That's one hell of a lot of spam storage!!

Seriously though, you do have to wonder how much spam google with end up storing.

Meaningless, but still cool

They can easily do this, because 99.9999999999% of their users will never have more than, say, 1 MB of mail anyway.

Even if you are reading several mailinglists you don't easily get over 1 GB of mail. Even my 2-3 year Bugtraq archive is just ~130 MB in size.

But still, the "cool" factor is what counts, obviously :)

Re:Meaningless, but still cool

Unless people start using this as a free remote backup service.

Or slow access disk.

<OldFartMode>
Way back in the day, I went through a period where I had too little disk quota to hold the temporary data I was generating in some experiments.

I used to email large (but non critical) files to myself via several US uucp sites then do the work. In a couple of days the prodigal files would return, by which time I'd have gotten rid of the temporary data.

Of course, `large' in those days was measured in KB, not GB.
</OldFartMode>

A little ingenuity with fetchmail and google has given you a terabyte disk. If they come looking for you with big sticks, I never said this.

Beta test

Ummm... isn't it the case when something is being beta tested, bugs like this will occur.

Nobody really expects a terrabyte of storage do they?

Re:Beta test

Nobody really expects a terrabyte of storage do they?

Well, they have to store the Spanish Inquisition somewhere.

Potential Problems

I think they may run into problems with the storage when people start emailing themselves huge compressed files in order to store them online. I recall reading that gmail doesnt give you 1Gb or 1Tb of disk space, but compresses your data so it feels like you have that much disk space, and because text compresses rather well, you can stick 1Gb of text into a relitively tiny space. Now compressed files, on the other hand, cant be compressed farther, and will most likely fill up your quota really quickly. I can just hear people bitching and complaining when they send one 20 meg zip file and have gmail tell them they are out of storage space :P

Re:Potential Problems

I recall reading that gmail doesnt give you 1Gb or 1Tb of disk space, but compresses your data so it feels like you have that much disk space, and because text compresses rather well, you can stick 1Gb of text into a relitively tiny space.

I'm not sure where you read this, but I just mailed my gmail account a ~10 Mb zip file. I had under 1 Mb of mail currently up there and after receiving the zipped file the amount of used disk space reported to me was 11 Mb (or 1% of the 1000 Mb). Now, if you theory was correct my usage should have been reported as much higher (probably something on the order of %15-%25 percent). It wasn't.

Hold on...

...it's just the binary representation of the size of your inbox

It was a mistake

If you follow the links in the article to the blog pages who first reported it, you will see that everyone's limit has went back to 1GB.

Remember its still in testing, i think this was a one off bug.

www.intelliot.com/blog/archives/2004/05/18/1-terab yte-1000-gb-of-gmail-storage

The price is still too high.

For the price they want, I could still run my own server. It costs probably 100 a year for a server that can hold easily more than One Gigabyte in email\storage. There is no practical use for the account anyway that there isn't already a cheaper solution for.

Re:Could this put google out of business

Cheap IDE drives and massive oversubscription. Backing up to tape is so last millenium, anyway. By the way, you can probably give each server quad 250GB IDE for the price of just the fibre channel controller. SAN has to be massively easier to administer (or massively faster, good luck with that) in order to make sense.

Apparently a Typo

While I haven't seen additional confirmation either way, Mike Masnick at Techdirt checked with a friend at Google [techdirt.com] who stated the the apparent increase to 1TB was a mistake, not a storage upgrade.

UPDATE: My account reverted

Not long after I submitted this article, my account (and those of 4 others I know) reverted back to 1,000 MB. Since the article does mention that Google had no official comment, it's quite possible that this was all a fluke. I had observed the changes earlier in the evening, but waited to see if there was official confirmation from a large new source (i.e. ZDnet) before thinking this was for reals. As it turns out, it may not have been so.

For reference, my friends and I noticed the size reductions around 1:45 AM PST. They did not occur all at once; mine was one of the last ones to get set to 1,000 MB. Another small detail is that not all gmail accounts I knew of got set to a terabyte- there was one user who was feeling quite left out in the gigabyte pool.

Lycos is not Google

Even though everybody seems to be talking about Lycos offering 1GB, I've seen very few people mention that Lycos' offer is not free [lycos.co.uk].

To get the 1GB account you will need to cough up 3.49GBP a month.

Still a good offer though, if you don't have the option of running your own server, but definately not as good as Google's free version.

Down to 1000MB

When I read the /. story and checked my Gmail account, it said "You are currently using 0 MB (0%) of your 1000000 MB". Then I read some other news and after 15 minutes, I went back to Gmail, it now says "You are currently using 0 MB (0%) of your 1000 MB". So, it seems that either Google guys read the /. story and corrected the problem or it was a joke...

How long would it take to transfer 1tb?

Well, let's see. Assuming 1.544Mb T-1 is available for use 24/7 and it's dedicated to sending 1mb attachments at a time (and you can send 1,000,000 of those). Figure about 60 megabytes an hour (or 60 messages an hour) it would take 16,667 hours or 694 days.

Google has nothing to worry about by offering 1tb of storage. They have two years to get it online...

Aw. just some typo in the /etc/quotas file

And that's all there's to it.
Besides, look at it as you'd look at overselling airplane seats, or dial-up capacity: It's pretty certain not will all be claimed at the same time, and you're pretty certain to get away with it. They could have added 3 more zeroes to that quota, and it wouldn'nt make the slightest difference.

How much would I pay?

Nothing. Why would I want to pay for a poor answer to a sovled problem? I have storage for my email; it's called a hard drive. I can already search through my past emails; it's called grep, sometimes even find. I don't get why everyone's so excited over google's solution to something that people have had figured out for twenty years.

Not everything belongs on the web. Email is one of those things.

To those who are complaining...

as Slashdot has said before, the LaCie BiggerDisk is a device with 1 TB of storage. You can buy it for $1100.
Hey, multiply that by the number of GMail accounts, and divide by the number of shares in Google... and you might get something close to Google's IPO price! Im a genius!

Compressed text search

Hmm... makes you wonder if they just cite the uncompressed plain text capability. Maybe they use heavy compression on the mail text and the clever bit is the fast search algorithms on the compressed mailboxes (mailboxen?).

Untrue

This is not true. From WebWereld [webwereld.nl], a Dutch online news site:

Update, 1:15 PM: It seems that this is a 'bug', sais a spokesman of Google. A mailbox of 1000 GB is not in consideration.

Ultimate Use of 10MB File Limit

Everyone is talking about how to use Gmail for file storage. Here are the facts:

10MB ATTACHMENT file storage limit.
First off -- nothing is said about not having multiple attachments per email. This is a "Good Thing"(tm)

As far as I'm concerned, that fact alone makes it very viable to be used for quite a few purposes:

1. The gmail filesystem
Have a system setup where a UNIQUE Identifier as the Subject maps to a Directory Value map (stored on your local system) -- now all you need is this small file, and you have access to a terabyte of storage. Each email can then store the Files for that directory (also as unique ID #'d file attachments) -- each file could be stored as a 10MB split volume size compressed/ENCRYPTED rar
-- the encrypted now eliminates privacy concerns
1a. Now that you have a filesystem on a remote machine here are your limitations/advantages:
* Any file you access over 10MB will be slower, because it will have to reconstruct from multiple rars
* Any file modification, and initial uploading of files will be painful -- most of us have asyncronous internet connections.
* Imagine how fast you can now send people ANYTHING -- just FORWARD the email thats sitting around -- most likely won't even cause google to use more storage

2. -- this last point also brings us back to what someone said about warez kiddies.
If anyone remembers the warez kiddy days back in AOL -- they used huge pools of forwarded emails to send warez around -- AOL only had a few MB limit, and no multiple attachments per email IIRC.
Now, people could email you Office 2003, 3GB in 10 sec. -- could get a little hairy

GFS: The GMail File System

GFS: How about a GMail Files System? I am not a programmer and don't geek down to that level, but it sounds plausible. Break your file system into say 256KB (encrypted) binary attachments with distinct subject lines for locating the the right message when you need it. You now have a huge store of email acting as the allocation units for a file system.

GFS RAID: Google is not the only one offering huge email stores. Get more than one of the huge accounts from Google or SpyMac [com.com] and you have the equivelent of multiple HDDs. If you call each of those allocation emails a "stripe" and spread them across two or three different stores, you have a GMail RAID-1 or RAID-5 set.

This sounds like it would be easy to simulate and run on a local mail server, then simply point to your GMail/SpyMac/Whatever accounts bring online. High latency and low bandwidth, yes, but very distributed. Maybe good for remote backups.

Just checked mine...

And I'm still at 1,000 MB.

I'm not sure that this is an appropriate marketing response to Lycos and others. Past a certain point, the numbers become effectively meaningless for users, meaning nothing other than "a whole lot of storage space". I would concentrate on searchability and that patented, slick Google interface.

And I would add the other things that Yahoo has, like a complete address book (currently it only accepts email addresses). Calendaring would be nice, too.

Google doesn't even need the limit.

A few people have made the comment that Google can do this because 99% of the people will only use a few MBs of storage anyway. Reasonable theory, but here's another idea -- it doesn't matter if everyone uses a massive amount of storage.

First, figure out how many people there are in the world that might potentially use Gmail. Then figure out what is the potential maximum amount of unique data each of those people could generate on a daily basis. Then determine the size of the redundant information that could pass through the Gmail servers.

Note that a huge percentage of emails and attachments are sent to multiple recipients. For each piece of email or attachment compute and store a unique hash. Each account consists of only a list of hashes and some header metadata. This redundant information will significantly reduce the total storage space.

A quick seach finds this Berkeley study [berkeley.edu] that suggests that there were about 400 PB of email (unique) generated last year. Assuming that you can save 1 GB of data for the fully-loaded cost of $1 (US) [pricewatch.com], storing all of the internet's annual email traffic costs $500M annually in the worst case.

The best case is significantly better than that, as you can:

a) compress text by up to 80%
b) store every mail only once
c) store every large binary only once
d) add storage as needed, not up-front
e) reduce the cost of storage over time [littletechshoppe.com]

This is off-the-cuff, but Google is looking at maybe a $50M annual investment in storage to store all the email on the internet, even if everyone uses it. They don't even need a storage limit. Period.

Missing Costs

Even if you assume they just added the HDD's to Google's extensive server farm (which as of yet is using RAM as a primary storage medium) There are quite a few costs you are missing. Such as...

Additional Bandwidth,
Additional electricity,
Additional server technicians,
An army of customer support personnel,
Additional Lawyers,
Additional Salespeople,
Additional physical storage for spare HDD's,

I would guess that these costs will far outstrip the $1 per GB cost of a Hard Drive.

Furthermore, data exapands to fill all available space... not through some trick of programming but because of how people use applications when limits are removed. Expect to see people's habits change when they realize their friends also have a 10 MB per-message transfer limit. Want that MP3? Sure, why not.

Finally, there will be the applications / abuses that hook into Gmail's storage space, which they will have to swat down. I could easily see groups of friendly music lovers automatically synchronizing their collections through Gmail, for example.

In other words, give Google some credit here. They are trying something original that could potentially blow up in their face, however jaded we may have become.

The bubble gum principle

This is something I like to call the bubble gum principle:

When I was in middle school, chewing gum in class or at school was against the rules, but yet everyone tried to get away withit, we practically had a bubble gum mafia.

But when I got to high school, they changed the rules that you could chew gum. All of a sudden, there were a lot less people chewing gum.

I know that this principle works in regards to quotas because on suso.org, I have absolutely no quotas, and don't have a problem with users getting out of hand with their disk space. Sure there are a few that use several GBs, but most of them don't and like the fact that it's unlimited.

with my DSL speed (384/128) ...

it would take me almost a year of receiving email (24x7) or 2.5 year of sending email to reach 1 Tb.

Gmail Swap

For anyone interested in trying out Gmail for themselves:

Gmail Swap [gmailswap.com]

Basically you post up what you're willing to trade for an account and if someone's interested you're set. Current notable items include a monkey, an iPod, cigars and many other much weirder things.

"unlimited" internet?

Whether it be 1GB or 1TB, I think either way this is going to go the way of "unlimited internet access". A great idea to lure in customers, but eventually reality sets in, capacity problems arise, and the fine print is tweaked to the point where "1GB" doesn't really mean 1GB anymore.

Users, given the option to be lazy, will be lazy. The system can only sustain people never deleting email (plus the inevitable abuse) for so long.

I wonder if Yahoo is going to wake up

GMail offering 1GB for free is nice, and with ignorable ads, I'm tempted to switch to them, obviously. Right now I'm a paying Yahoo Mail customer, and I look at the prices they charge even now.. 100MB for $59.99.. So Yahoo claims they'll offer 100MB for free and "virtually unlimited" for paying customers. Well, a big reason I went for Yahoo is because I have a highly configured personalized Yahoo homepage and wanted to integrate my mail smoothly into it. However, if anyone's tried putting the "Yahoo Mail Preview" into their Yahoo home page, they'll be dismayed to learn that it usually does not display correctly, and "times out" or whatever.

So I ended up removing it from my homepage, and now Yahoo's on equal footing again. Paying for ad free email is worth it, and the address guard service is nice (disposable email addresses), but Yahoo will sure look bad offering only one tenth the storage of what the competition offers. Yahoo claims they're not going to take it sitting down though, so I'm looking forward to seeing capitalism give me a nice deal from one of them.

duplication, redundant data?

has it occured to anyone else that gmail might save space by not storing individual copies of spam, chain letters, mailing list items, etc? just md5 every message (then check content if theres a match, just in case) and store pointers in people's mailboxes. 50000 people get the same spam, gmail uses 50000*n+1*N space instead of 50000*N (n is a small pointer, N is a big message) space.

Absurd

This must be a mistake. They can't give away 1TB of free disk space at today's prices. Disks still cost about $1/GB. Even if they could get half price with bulk discounts, and another ten times better by reclaiming empty space from one account to give to another, no company can afford to give away $50 of disk space for free to anyone who signs up.

Clever Ploy To Test gMail?

Humm,

If you brand spanking new email service is in beta, and you have a limited number of testers who are all connected enough to have received a gMail invite, what better way to test how well the system handles a massive load over a given period of time then by upping the storage limit on a few key accounts to 1TB?

As the news hits the field, I am sure everyone with a gMail acount logged on ASAP to see if the reports were true (I know I did).

Email back from my bug report yesterday...

Gmail Team to me
More options 10:02am (31 minutes ago)
Hello,

Thank you for your message and bug report regarding the incorrect quota
amount listed in your Gmail account.

As always, each Gmail user is offered 1,000 megabytes (MB) of storage.

We apologize for any confusion this issue may have caused. We are aware of
this problem, and our engineers are working diligently to find a solution.
In the meantime, sending and receiving email in your Gmail account will
reset your storage limit counter to 1,000 MB. We appreciate your patience
during our limited test period, and we thank you for taking the time to
send us your feedback and concerns.

We hope you enjoy Google's approach to email.

Sincerely,

The Gmail Team

Hotmail, Yahoo execs just about died

I can just imagine Hotmail and Yahoo executives having a heart attack on that little mistake. :)

Re:non sense

None to the average user but 10000megs allows Google to claim it has the largest free email storage space. guess they didn't like Lycos raining on their parade. :)

Re:non sense

what the different between 1000MB and 10000000000MB

999998000 MB

Re:magic hard drives

Do you check up with the news at all? Google has already announced their IPO. Funding isn't going to be an issue with google for a while...

Re:HOLY CRAP

What can you do with that much email space. Loose every important message you ever get.

All those people who save forwars will use Gmail.

Re:magic hard drives

This is just a wild guess, but maybe they don't allocate the whole 1TB of disk space to each user when they sign up, but only allocate on demand.

And as many posters have pointed out, most people are unlikely to use anywhere near 1GB let alone 1Tb. Especially with the 10MB attachment limit it will take 10^5 bloated e-mails to reach capacity.

On the other hand I like the idea of using an account as an offsite incremental backup. My daily incrementals are generally less than 10MB, it would be a very convenient method of storage. Until they claim that they have rights to any intellectual property stored on their servers. But they wouldn't do that because Google Are Nice People (TM).

Re:At 256Kbps upload.

They could cap upload streams at 64Kb/s and it would take four years to fill (if someone wanted to keep at it day and night) - heck in four years 1TB hard drives will be commonplace and cheap.