Google Vows to Increase Gmail Limit

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."

Why don't people care about their data's safety?

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it astounding that people would so willing store so much personal information on the servers of these companies. I don't care if we're talking about Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, or some other company. It's just damn scary to think that so many people would just give out all that data. Is it because they're ignorant of the risks? Or maybe they know, but it's convenient, and they're willing to take the chance that the naked photos of themselves that they're storing in their hosted email account could be publically released?

just one new feature

[DMoylan]

i'd be really happy if they allowed me to delete the attachments but leave the email. i believe the feature was requested yonks ago but so far has not happened. i'm currently at 50% but that would drop to less than 10% if i could delete the attachments i already have downloaded.

other than that i cannot fault the service. i get my email at work, home and on my phone with no hassles. thanks google!

Hotmail fails to trans,it attachments...

[justanetgod]

Microsoft can advertise that users have a larger capacity with ease - many users have reported that attachments aren't transmitted when using Hotmail, and I've experienced this phenomena personally. Easy to add vaporous capacity to Hotmail, or would bogus be a better term? Gmail on the other hand has never done this to me.

Single point of failure + high value target

[G4from128k]

I can understand using these services as a backup, but as people shift more and more of their online life to web 2.0, they will find that less and less of their files/data/structured products reside on their own local PC. How many people have a full backup of their Flickr albums (with all the organization structures and metadata that they've enter into flickr?) How many people have a full backup of their GMail accounts? These systems are just one botched upgrade away from data loss (does Google or its competitors have a full backup of ALL users' mail service data and will the restore process actual work?)

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.

DVD service next?

[Pig Hogger]

I can see where they're coming to... A new service:

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!!!

Re:just one new feature

[LiquidCoooled]

That sounds like a really good feature for right here, right now.
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.

Yahoo mail isn't unlimited.

[aliquis]

Or why does it say 1GB once you want to sign up?

Re:Why don't people care about their data's safety

[wile_e_wonka]

Some of us use gmail for most of our email and use something less risky for the "naked photos of ourselves."

Re:hands up

[michrech]

I've got 2270 messages sitting in my inbox and that only equates to 90mb... The oldest message there is from 07/30/2004 (the date I finally got an invite!), and it is from "Gmail Team", telling me how Gmail is different. :)

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 find a way to set the "default" label I see when I first open my inbox (what if I don't *want* to see every single email I have when I first log in?).

I'm sure there is someone here with an even older account. This is just my two cents. :)

Re:hands up

[calebt3]

3069?????
My limit is at 2993.

Re:Why don't people care about their data's safety

[speaker of the truth]

Can you please post your e-mails from your Gmail account then? After all, you don't care about security do you?

Re:hands up

[rucs_hack]

I use it as a rolling backup of important documents. One to the working folder, one to a backup drive on another machine, and one to Gmail. With the integration of gmail with google docs, thats actually incredibly handy. I have several utility spreadsheets sat in google docs that I use quite often.

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

[Firehed]

I get 300GB storage and 3TB of bandwidth for under eight bucks a month (and they often have sign-up specials that knock that down to six or so). If all you're looking for is a gigantic inbox, I think that should suffice reasonably. PowWeb [powweb.com], if you care.

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.

Re:Single point of failure + high value target

[evilviper]

How many people have a full backup of their Flickr albums

Probably every one of them.

(with all the organization structures and metadata that they've enter into flickr?)

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.

These systems are just one botched upgrade away from data loss

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 viruses, OS bugs, and hardware failure. Many, many more than have had a sudden data loss from any major service provider.

I imagine free internet storage is the only form of backups most regular people have. I would certainly trust Google over any particular hard drive, and the chances are pretty damn slim that both would fail catastrophically at the same time.

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.

After a couple days, when Google gets a dozen complaints about each account, then what? How long will it take to get a million accounts again? A "single point of failure" is also a single point of control that can be used quite effectively against malicious individuals like spammers.

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.

And if a bullfrog had wings he wouldn't bump his ass when he hopped.

Just because you can invent a magical little hypothetical doesn't make it actually possible.

My point is that these massive system have some serious single-points of failure and are becoming extremely high-value targets for internet criminals.

"Massive" tends to be mutually exclusive with "single-points of failure" and the site where you upload your GBs of pictures is about the lowest-value a target could possibly be.

Getting access to a web site doesn't grant criminals any special privileges. All they can do is potentially capture the information you input to that specific site. A very, very different thing than getting root access on a local machine. Websites have been taken-over many times before, and no matter how important the site, it wasn't the end of the world for anyone.

I'd be much, much, MUCH more worried about the security of my paypal account than my GMail and Flikr accounts.

Re:Why don't people care about their data's safety

[ScrewMaster]

Well, I do run my own server and there are many ways to get around a port 25 block. At the moment, I use No-IP's alternate-port mail service for SMTP. The server tries to send the message directly to the destination server if it can, but since many ISPs won't accept mail from a non-static IP, if that fails it falls back and sends the message out through No-IP's server on a different port. Works extremely well, and I haven't had an outgoing message go through my ISP's mail server in years.

For incoming mail, my domain hosting company points their MX records directly at my server, using a dynamic DNS lookup in case my IP address changes, so the sending host just sends the mail directly to my machine. Never passes through anyone else's mail system that way. No I'm not very trusting.

A distributed mail system would be very interesting, wouldn't it? I mean, given what's been shown to be possible with the Gnutella protocol and the distributed hash table techniques in modern Bit Torrent clients, a truly distributed email system could be very effective. More to the point, it would be very much in line with the way the IP network was supposed to be used, for reliable command and control. Anything centralized is a point of failure, from either the reliability or security perspectives.

False comparison between GMail and other services.

[argent]

The "capacities" Microsoft and Yahoo and Google are providing are not comparable values. That's because they're all overcommitted quotas, calculated by assuming that the majority of users aren't going to take advantage of them and only turning up actual hardware to back them up when the window between the actually used and actually available storage gets too low.

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 Hotmail and Yahoo to GMail here is pointing out that Yahoo and Hotmail have a smaller percentage of their users taking advantage of their quota, for whatever reason.

Re:hands up

[AndroidCat]

I use my Gmail accounts more as filters than as storage areas.

Re:just one new feature

[budgenator]

What I've always wondered is why Google doesn't just figure out a way to delete duplicates and keep one attachment for each Email to use, just think of how much space they could save by just storing one Cutsie picture of kittens playing with yarn instead of one for everyone in Aunt Millie's Email List.
  as for your red hot ex girlfriend in a Princess Leia, check usenet.

Re:Hotmail fails to trans,it attachments...

[budgenator]

And GMail doesn't allow you to transmit Windows executables AND it scans zip files for windows executables but leave Linux and Mac executable alone, and doesn't check .tgz files. They both have unfriendly policies when it comes to attachments, but most Windows users need the protection eve if it is annoying for people on other OSes.
There fixed it for you.

You are currently using 225 MB (7%)

[blackwizard]

I've been using gmail almost since launch and I've been pretty frugal with the space.

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.

Re:hands up

[c_forq]

At least at my university, a lot of the events sent out through the mailing list have PDFs or Word documents attached. Many others are heavily formatted with HTML, using images in order to do word art. It adds up quickly, and I am happy to see Google increase their space as I noticed my free space percentage has been steadily decreasing.