netmouse | Is it just me, or is gmail getting more conservative about account storage space?

When I first signed up for a Gmail account, they were all on the theme of "Why delete messages when you can archive instead?" The interface still makes it much more work to trash messages than to archive them (you have to select an option from a pull-down menu as opposed to just clicking a button).

But I could swear that when I got my account, at the bottom of my email listing, it proudly told me how much of my some-huge-number-of MB space I was using. And I was at 1% because the total was huge... Now, it says,

You are currently using 206 MB (8%) of your 2669 MB.

8%. In less than a year. Now, granted, I do a lot of publications editing, so people send me a lot of files, but this is not a good trend for a service that originally claimed it wanted us to "Save everything!" And I could swear that 2669 MB used to be something round, like 10,000 MB. Or 100,000? Am I making that up?

The Gmail servers also now occassionally report they are unable to complete an action (logging in, sending an email, or whatever) and request that I try again in a few seconds or a few minutes, and Bill recently reported that gmail refused to email a file because it was too large.

Does anyone know what's going on with them? Just failing to ramp up to more users? Or something else?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Well, it used to be 1GB, and then it was 2GB. I don't think it was ever anything like 10,000MB.

I do have a GMail account, but I never check it, because I have too many other accounts, and I'm not surprised that their servers are overloaded. That's what happens when someone wants to be The King. :)

The nice round number was 1000MB. Now the number counts up slowly over time. I'm guessing the number is not growing linearly. I'm guessing it's growing exponentially.

I'm really impressed you've managed to use that much in a year. :-)

As for refusing to send a file that's too large... That's interesting, and it would be interesting to know how large was too large. :-)

I was sending a attachment; probably was 20 megs. I was kinda abusing them as a ftp server, to get one file to another computer I own... Still, 20 meg attachments are not impossibly large in this day.

--Bill

No, that's not impossibly large. I'm a bit surprised. I would think the cutoff to be more around 50 or so.

I thought I recalled it being measured in Gigabytes. When Gmail was new enough that I still paid attention to what the login page said, they made out the storage space to be, for all practical intents and purposes, indefinite.

I suspect that clueless users are abusing email by sending huge files instead of sending URLs.

Also, from a marketing perspective: if they don't remind you of the limit, you won't be grateful when they raise it next year. Or you won't purchase their (hypothetical) premium 3 TB limit service when that arrives.

From the wikipidea:

Two gigabytes of storage

Beginning on April 1, 2005 (Gmail's first birthday), Gmail started to offer 2 gigabytes of email storage space, which is increasing steadily ever after. This figure and the original offering of 1000 megabytes are hundreds of times more than what other webmail services offered at the time of Gmail's original announcement in 2004. Google suggests that users "archive", rather than delete their messages; Gmail's more than 2 gigabyte of storage is sufficient to hold many years' worth of an average user's e-mails, and Gmail's search technology allows users to search their archives easily. Additionally, users can store files (up to 10 megabytes in size) as e-mail attachments.

Current storage limit — As of November 30th, 2005, the maximum storage capacity has surpassed 2669.737820 MB. [4]

Originally, the rate of increase was one megabyte every 7.44 hours (or 7 hours, 26 minutes and 24 seconds). This means that the storage space increases approximately 134.4 kilobytes each hour. Recently, however, the rate of increase has slowed down considerably - it seems that the rate of increase is now only between 13 and 14 kB per hour.

8% is impressive, I'm still at 3% and also using it as a backup harddrive.

I'm using 22% (581 MB) of my main GMail account, and I have about a dozen others that easily total over 1 GB. I have a separate "archive" account that I use just for file storage. If I ever get around to loading the Linux 'gmailfs' extension, I'm sure I'll allocate several accounts just for that purpose.

When I signed on they offered 1GB. I still regularly trash things just because it's easier to read through fewer things, and many things I receive are time-sensitive. The April plant sale specials are fairly worthless once April passes :-)

I also use it to store files offsite, but nothing secure.

Has anyone else noticed a huge increase in the amount of spam landing in your gmail box? I swear I've been deluged with more RAZR and ringtone offers in this past week than in my entire life. :P

I trash things all the time. I'm on too many lists, really. But I do go to some effort to process my mail. Still, my inbox has 158 unread messages. There are 1162 messages in my inbox, total, and 1953 in my whole archive. The spam folder has 1210 messages, which I assume impact my disc usage. Note that's just spam that's less than 30 days old. Trash is also kept around for 30 days, so let's see... there are 2389 messages/lines in my trash folder. So that's how many I've trashed (manually or with filters) in the last 30 days. And actually I *think* that's technically how many conversations I've trashed, not how many individual messages.

hmm... looking at it, it looks like recently about half of my trashed messages are Bounce messages that are notifications of spam being sent to sfoha-talk. I have those on a filter. I should see if I can just get that notification shut off. I should also probably obfuscate that address on the sfoha web site.

Yes, I've been seeing a lot more spam make it to my inbox lately. And I'm almost surprised the gmail hasn't devised language filters by now. maybe I'll give them the suggestion. Because I'd like to say "I don't read russian. Anyone who has a reason to write to me will write to me in english. Or, on a long shot, spanish or french or German or hungarian. All Russian (or chinese, etc) is spam."

When I look at the oldest messages in my trash, they're from February. so it is *not* permanently deleting messages in trash that are more than 30 days old. And there is no command for "empty trash" in gmail.

Aren't you in any way concerned about the privacy implications of using this service?

K.

yeah, that's actually part of why I'm concerned that trash isn't going away. I mean, not too concerned, because they make backups, so I expect nearly everything to live on in perpetuity anyway. I wouldn't use the service if I didn't think google will at least keep my email content in-house. I mean, most any email service *could* keep all your email, and probably does keep a lot of it in server backups; google is just up front about it. I'm not worried about the "using the content of my mail to point advertising at me" part.

But the fact that the trash isn't going away means that if there are any messages I really want deleted I need to delete them myself, not just put them in the trash. I guess that was always true.

You're right... I just checked and I have old trash as well. You can "empty trash" in gmail but it's clumsy. You just select the messages you don't want (or click the "select all" box) and then click "delete forever" just like in the spam window. It's not quick, but it did remove the items from my space as I lost 3MB.

yeah, deleting old mail at the rate of 50 at a time (or whatever your display size is in which you can "select all") is pretty clumsy. But it does work.

oh well, I emailed gmail about the problem and they said they were working on it.

Is it just me, or is gmail getting more conservative about account storage space?

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