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

[netmouse]

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?

Comments

[eviljohn.livejournal.com]

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.

[bjorng.livejournal.com]

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.