Gmail Quota Fears -- With Good Reason

I have about 3% of my email now going to my Gmail account, and in four months of use I have filled about one-sixth of my Gmail quota (and that's with my actively deleting things). At this rate I will have filled my Gmail box in 20 months. That's not confidence-inspiring. There's no way I can open the floodgates for the other 97% of my email to flow into my Gmailbox, or I would overflow it before the end of 2004.

What's sad is that Gmail help tells me "one gigabyte -- while it's not quite a googol, it's probably more storage than you'll ever need. With so much space, you can keep all your messages..." No, actually. I can't. Let me repeat that:

Gmail actually offers much less email storage than I'll ever need.

So while I might want to consider Gmail as a net hard drive, I'm feeling increasingly less comfortable considering Gmail as a long-term email solution.

I didn't always feel this way. Once upon a time (four months ago), The Tao Of Mac assuaged my fear of Gmail's quota, with the economics of webmail storage:

Someone who receives an average of 10 messages a day at 32KB/message will take nine years to fill their Gmailbox.

I wonder if I'm eventually going to have to abandon my Gmail account because there's no more space.

The Gmail FAQ indicates that Google employees each get a terabyte of gmail, so maybe there will be a way to get more space. I would probably have to pay, since according to the secret source of Google's power, "the yearly monetized value of a webmail [is] in the $1-10 range."

So I sent a question to Gmail help to ask them what happens when I hit my Gmail limit, and if I can buy more space. The answer will affect how I use the Google Operating System going forward.

Update, August 30, 2004. I just got an update from the Gmail team, and it does not look good...

Hello Adam,

Thank you for your message.

Gmail provides you with 1,000 megabytes of storage space. When you come
close to reaching your storage limit, the quota displayed along the bottom
of your account changes from green to red to let you know that your
account is near capacity.

Should you go over your storage limit, your account will not receive
incoming mail.

We hope you enjoy Google's approach to email.

Sincerely,

The Gmail Team

Oh well. My enthusiasm for Gmail just went down a bunch. Here's my plea to Google:

Please let me buy more Gmail capacity if I need it, rather than bouncing any future emails I might get...

They're probably being stingy with additional storage because they're anticipating needing that storage in beating eBay and Amazon to the Semantic Web.

What's next for Google? ISP, Browser, Desktop Search, Messenger?

Comments

[Bibi]

I used 10% of my space on Gmail and I joined on 9th June! And I dond't sign a lot of lists and don't receive videos or music on my mail. So, in two years I will have to delet my messages :-/

[Adam]

We both suffer, Bibi. I see Gmail gave you more invites -- too bad we cannot use invites to increase the quota of existing accounts by inviting those accounts again. :)

[Elizabeth]

10 messages a day? Who only gets 10 emails a day??? :P

[Adam]

Exactly!! We've been bamboozled... ;)

[BillSaysThis]

Well, you could use those invitations to set up new accounts, not as useful as one big account but better than none. Or you can have my invitations.

[Bibi]

I'm so sorry Adam :(
I can send you other invite if I receive more invites on Gmail. I think you really need another one.

[Adam]

It's ok, I have like six more invites so I can keep inviting myself. My email address will keep changing from ifindkarma to ifindkarma2 to ifindkarma3 ... I can keep generating more.

Every time I invite myself to give myself another Gmail account, the new Gmail account gets more invitations I can hand out. It's like being granted three wishes, and one of the things I can wish for is more wishes. :)

Searching across my Gmail accounts would be a nice feature. I oughtta request it.

[Adam]

Now here's an excellent way to get over my Gmail quota fears...

Google claims in its promotion of Gmail that users never will have to delete emails again, due to the pure dimension of its service. Hriders.com, based in Irvine, California, believes that one Gigabyte simply is not enough and offers what Google presented as a bug to some users in the week after Gmail's launch: A whopping 100 GByte.

Hellacious Riders' primary business is an online motorcycle magazine which publishes articles about motorcycles, lists classifieds, and provides access to a topic-specific search engine. In order to attract interest, the company launched a 3-Gigabyte free email service a little over a month ago and since then has signed up more than 36 million users, according to Jim Weiss, President of the iTrade Group which publishes Hellacious Riders.

In a rational view, the motorcycle site has little to do with email. Weiss however said that he noticed the attention Gmail received and felt this was a great way to promote his site. "Gmail was incredibly hyped and it is not even out today, " he said. "So we decided to offer a 3 GByte email account to users. But it is easy for others to increase that to 5 GByte. We wanted to do something 'hellacious' and came up with the idea to offer 100 GByte and allow users to send attachments in sizes up to 500 MByte."

100 GByte would translate into approximately four million emails or 200,000 high-resolution digital images.

Up to today, Weiss has signed up 52 million users in countries - a number which he wants to grow significantly to be recognized as record: "We would like to be included in the Guinness Book of Records for the world's largest mailing list," he said.

iTrade pays for the service through advertising revenues, generated by ads displayed in a banner on the websites and in a newsletter the company sends out once a month. Weiss stated that he will offer firms to advertise in his newsletter which currently is sent to 40.5 million users who have agreed to receive the information. Users would not see pop-up on the service, he said. Email can be viewed either on the website or through any popular email client which supports POP3.

While Hellacious Riders remains the core business of iTrade, Weiss said that the email service is growing quickly and may be spun off to another service. For the coming week he plans to launch a fee based email service with capacities ranging from one Gigabyte to one TByte. An ad-free 100 GByte email account will be priced at $150 per year.

In a challenge to demonstrate the size of the account, he said that he would challenge readers of Tom's Hardware Guide to fill up the complete account with data. "The first user who is able to use the complete space will receive from us a free email account with one TByte space on a dedicated server," Weiss said. "This will be the worlds largest email inbox."

Wow. Sounds like a reasonable challenge to me... :)

Everyone say it with me: A gigabyte storage quota for gmail is not enough!! :) :) :)

[Adam]

Addict3d.org tells us how to remove Gmail ads with the Firefox browser:

Source: http://www.digitalmediaminute.com/article/1063/remove-text-ads-from-gmail

Do you find the text ads in GMail to be annoying? If you do, you can use Firefox to hide the ads from displaying.

This trick uses CSS and the Firefox configuration file named userContent.css . Before we start modifying our userContent.css file, I would recommend that you install an extension named ChromeEdit that simplifies the process of modifying your Firefox configuration files. So before you enter the CSS code listed below, go and install this extension (note: you'll need to restart your browser after installation, so you may want to bookmark this page).

Now that you have CromeEdit installed, click on the Firefox Tools menu and then click on the menu item labeled Edit User Files. A new window will appear that has five tabs across the top. Click on the tab that is labeled userContent.css. Next copy the CSS code below and paste it into the userContent.css file, then click the Save button.

#rh table[class="metatable"]{display: none !important;}
#rh div[class="c"] {display: none !important;}

Now, restart your browser and open GMail -- the ads are gone!

Much more info at the source...

Not that I'd want to do that. I actually like the Google ads next to my Gmail -- they're like an old friend sitting there reading my mail by my side. Though I must admit I've never clicked on a single one.

[Elizabeth]

The Google ads don't bother me at all. It's like I've turned them off in my mind, and I don't really even see them, much less click on them. Graphic ads, where they come from a different server and always seem to make the page load more slowly? HATE them. :P

[Adam]

Well, 1gb quota exceeded experiences are not a good sign.

I broke Gmail 1GB space limit! :shock:

You are currently using 1017 MB (102%) of your 1000 MB

I have 2305 spams and 157 deleted mails in “Trash". Gmail sums them all in the space used as well… :mad:

Anyway, it seems like we can “overload” Gmail even exceeded the email quota. I am not sure how much we can overload.

Gmail refuse to send email because exceeded quota.

I still can receive incoming mails, but Gmail refuses to send your email after Gmail quota exceeded.

Well, at least I haven't exceeded my limit yet. I'm still gambling that the price of storage drops enough in 2005 that Google will up the quota limit of power users to 2 or 3 Gig in time that I won't have to delete anything.

If they really wanted me to move *all* my email over to Gmail, though, I would need assurance of a few hundred Gig of storage.

A 250 Gig hard drive would cost me a little less than $200 at retail prices right now. It's a shame I can't just pay Gmail the two hundred bucks and never have to worry about my email storage quota again.

Although, what am I saying? The moment my quota is 200 Gig I know people will start sending me movies and other things that will fill up the space. Nature abhors a vacuum.

We can never have enough storage. I just hope the price of storage keeps dropping as my appetite for storage keeps increasing...

[Adam]

Mitch Kapor writes,

I would consider myself a demanding email user. I receive well over 100 non-spam messages a day, subscribe to multiple mailing lists, and use folders on a desktop client to manage my workflow. I keep many years of email, though I only rarely need to look at a message older than six months. My working set of mail is about 500 MB.

The great search, relatively simple filtering and labeling features, and auto-complete of addresses more than meet my needs. Surprisingly, the UI, while hardly enjoying the visual elegance of Apple's mail.app is just about up to the task. Technically, there is no reason valuable, missing capabilities like drag and drop can't be put in a browser. Google just hasn't, yet. Even without drag and drop, the UI is serviceable.

If gmail offered a way to synchronize gracefully with IMAP (including associations between labels and folders), and if it let me store more than 1 GB of mail as well as retain more ownership and control of my mail, I'd be happy. I need to keep a unified archive, and in six months I've already used 500 MB.

Consider this the latest in a series of pleas to increase the potential size of our Gmailboxes, please.

We the power users continue to up our usage of Gmail, so when it comes to your quotas, Gmail, please up yours.

Wait, that didn't come out right... ;)

[Adam]

Gmail has now officially posted an answer to the question, What happens if I near my storage limit?

With 1 gigabyte of memory, it may take years to reach your storage quota. But when your storage capacity is close to full, the quota indicator displayed at the bottom of your account will change from green to red.

If you go over your storage limit, Gmail will hold your messages for a few days while you clear out some space. If you don't delete anything within that allotted time, you won’t be able to receive new messages, and messages sent to your account will then be returned to sender.

updated 1/24/2005

Note that this is in contention to the claim that Gmail offers

About one thousand megabytes. That's a whole gigabyte. While it's not quite a googol, it's probably more storage than most users will ever need. With so much space, you can keep every message you send or receive, and take advantage of Google's search technology to retrieve them.

The problem of power users will one day be everyone's problem. A gigabyte is nowhere near enough storage to keep every message I send or receive.

I do spend way too much time now deleting Gmails so I don't exceed my quota. The main causes of this problem for me are mailing lists, websites that use email for alerts, and disgustingly fat Adobe- and Microsoft-formatted attachments.

The promise of "never have to delete an email again" still goes unfulfilled and perhaps Yahoo or Microsoft can one-up Google if they step up and offer Power Users more than a Gig of space.

[Adam]

We interrupt my latest escapades dealing with email overload to bring you this important message...

Google really doesn't know what to do with people who get lots of email. Here's what Fernando Cassia writes in Gmail accounts are bottomless barrels:

PLENTY OF US use Google's Gmail accounts on a daily basis. I, for instance, obtained my first account back in early June, 2004. It only took me 10 months to fill Google's until then considered "huge" storage space. See, one gigabyte is not so much after all when you start leaving all your email on the remote server.

...

Until Google figures what to do with those of us with full Gmail accounts, and if you don't want to risk losing your email due to bounces, you can use a trick. Open a secondary Gmail account, and then configure Google's forwarding option to forward every inbound message to your secondary one, selecting the option "trash it from the inbox" so you don't end up with duplicates.

There's a side effect to this, however. You end up with two "isolated islands" of email bases, and you have to log in and log out in order to search in each. Clearly, Google better decide what to do with those of us in this position, as my blood pressure has already started going up.

Come on, Google. Microsoft Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail already let us buy 2 Gigabytes if we're willing to pay an annual fee. Either raise the quota to 10 Gigabytes (or, if you want to be seen as cool,

be really bold and raise the Gmail quota to a Terabyte -- or, better yet, get rid of the quota entirely!

)... or you'll be forced to listen to increasingly more people complain about the suckitude of Gmail.

While I'm on the subject of Gmail, here are two more nuggets:

• I occasionally stumble on an article about Gmail spam effectiveness. So far so good for me but I wonder if I'll still think so in a year.


• The first issue of Make Magazine has Ten Cool Gmail Hacks. Some are quite useful.

[Adam]

Thank you, John Battelle:

Google announced tonight that it will up its Gmail limit to 2 GB, and that it plans to increase the limit to...the sky. Really. This is not an April Fools' joke. I spoke to Google PR, and they told me that they shortly intend to lift the limit entirely on Gmail - well, not entirely, but they hope to allow as much as possible - which in the end, I was told, makes it pretty much limitless. Google Grid, ho! ... Mail = pageviews. Pageviews = profits. Rinse. Repeat.

Adds CNET,

The Mountain View, Calif.-based Web giant on Friday plans to double the free storage on Gmail from 1GB to 2GB, said Georges Harik, Gmail product management director. After that, Google will add a yet-to-be-determined amount of extra storage daily, with no plans to stop.

The move highlights the seemingly inexhaustible storage needs of a small group of heavy e-mail users, and the sharply falling costs of online storage. Lifting pre-defined storage caps for Web-based e-mail could have broader ripple effects, Harik said, changing the way people think about quotas from something that is set in advance to something that grows with the user.

"We wanted to make sure we have a plan in place for when people reach their storage limit," he explained. "We don't want people to worry that they might run out."

...

In the first year of service, Gmail defied expectations, Harik said. The privacy concerns have amounted to little or nothing, he said, but the storage capacity became a pressing concern when some heavy Gmail users came close to using up their pre-set limit.

"One gigabyte did seem like a lot, but it turns out there are a lot of heavy users of mail," he said. "They send attachments, share photos. It all adds up." He said Google discourages customers from using Gmail as a vast storage locker for music and video files. He said Google does not disclose the storage patterns of its users, but said a small but not insignificant number of users were close to exceeding the 1GB limit.

Praise the Lord, hallelujah, makes me want to kiss the feet of someone at Google...

[Ank]

Dude Adam,

Go get a life. kiss the feet of someome in google for 1 GB??? !! man u need help. thaty is pathetic. nothing short of 10gb is going to be any good.

Ank

[forumhpp]

GMAIL isn't so good after all.
Its username and password tend to go 'Ka-put'.
Is this because its still in beta stage...??

[poopy pants]

Don't be so cheap. If you're gonna pay for something, go get an email hosting package for christ's sakes. Duh!
Why would you pay for an email service that is still in its beta stage?

[Denis]

hi im using gmail but i want to use hriders.com cos gmail its to small for me. i sign in into the hriders and i dont have any email account. WHY?

[Account Deleted]

Each person clickity click clicking away at a little machine that they are sucked into like a fly to light. Sorry, but that's just entirely too open for me. This is a Brave New World turning out as prophecy of our immediate future. There are at least three things about Kevin's comment that made Rohit smile: the invocation of physics, the notion that 30 is relative, and the thought of seeing you next week.

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