The Era of 15GB Free Gmail Storage Is Ending (androidauthority.com) 94
Google has confirmed it is testing a 5GB storage limit for some new Gmail accounts, with users able to unlock the standard 15GB by adding a phone number. Android Authority reports: While the company didn't mention which regions are impacted, user reports from yesterday were mostly from African countries. That said, if Google's tests prove successful, this could possibly become the norm for new sign-ups in more regions. The company could be testing ways to discourage users from creating multiple Gmail accounts to access free cloud storage. However, if you already have a Gmail account with 15GB free storage, it shouldn't be impacted by this change.
The language on Google's support page mentions "up to 15GB of storage." However, it's a recent change. An archived version of the support page from February did not use the words "up to." Whether the test has been running since early March or Google updated its language before it ever started the test, it's evident that the company could roll out the change globally as well.
The language on Google's support page mentions "up to 15GB of storage." However, it's a recent change. An archived version of the support page from February did not use the words "up to." Whether the test has been running since early March or Google updated its language before it ever started the test, it's evident that the company could roll out the change globally as well.
If it's free, you are the product (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If it's free, you are the product (Score:4, Informative)
I remember during the beta when they claimed it was unlimited storage with no need for a delete function and only an archive feature.
Re: If it's free, you are the product (Score:2)
The absence of the delete feature and unlimited storage was prompted by grants from law enforcement. Email stored for over 6 months is considered "abandoned" and does not require a warrant for law enforcement to obtain and read. Another feature of abandoned emails is that attorney-client and spousal privilege are set aside because clearly no one cares about "abandoned" material.
Re: If it's free, you are the product (Score:3)
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Because there isn't anything else out there at an enterprise level. You can try to run your home email server, but almost always, the IP range you would be on is blackholed, and even if it wasn't, it doesn't take much for it to be. Mail has been lost as a DYO service. If you want to run it, host your receiving end, use a commercial SMTP provider to send, but one will find going with an offsite solution is much less of a pain.
Businesses, it is worse. One lost email can mean a lost sale, or a customer una
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"Businesses, it is worse. One lost email can mean a lost sale, or a customer unable to contact you and then resorting to legal means [1]."
This is very real and it almost seemed to happen overnight. Once upon a time as a freelance service tech I had dozens of small business clients who hosted their own email and it just doesn't make sense for a say a cabinet maker with 20 ppl on staff to pay for a T1 when they could have some multiple of the bandwidth and the same uptime from the same provider for a tenth of
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Maybe this is just Google saving people from themselves. If your email inbox is 15GB in size I think you may have a problem (or you're abusing the system, in which case Google is taking measures).
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Maybe this is just Google saving people from themselves. If your email inbox is 15GB in size I think you may have a problem (or you're abusing the system, in which case Google is taking measures).
The storage is not just used for the inbox, but the archive as well.
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True but has 15GB actually been useful? I don't think I know a single person who has less than 15GB of images/videos. I only know people who turned off syncing for everything, or pay for a higher tier.
But in retrospect when I read your post I'm reminded of one thing that may affect people: WhatsApp backups. With the modern world of everyone sending each other GIF memes it's amazing how quickly Whatsapp storage can fill up if messages and media are both backed up.
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True but has 15GB actually been useful? I don't think I know a single person who has less than 15GB of images/videos. I only know people who turned off syncing for everything, or pay for a higher tier.
But in retrospect when I read your post I'm reminded of one thing that may affect people: WhatsApp backups. With the modern world of everyone sending each other GIF memes it's amazing how quickly Whatsapp storage can fill up if messages and media are both backed up.
15 GB has been enough for me. My oldest email is from 1999, as I imported some older email as accounts - and I've used it since the beta invitation phase.
If I had photos there too it would not be enough, I've got hundreds of gigs of photos and movies - but those are on iCloud where I do have to pay. I've got a local copy on my NAS as well, but the added convenience and safety is worth it. There many memories there, for decades.
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I've got less than a year of email locally in Thunderbird for one mail account and it tops 10GB.
I think you underestimate the amount of space files can take: attached files take up a lot. What do I do with that email, delete it? That's not a workable solution if I want to retain the metadata associated with the files (which I do).
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Thunderbird gives you a few options to manage your email storage. Assume an email with both HUGE inline photos and a 20MB attachment.
For the attachments:
1. If you need the email metadata (date, time, sender) of the email, but not the actual attachment, you can right-click on only the attachment and delete it.
2. If you need the email metadata but want to keep your email cache smaller, you can detach the attachment and store it outside Thunderbird. This lets you edit, modify, trim, or store it in a compre
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or you're abusing the system, in which case Google is taking measures
Almost 20 years ago, back when Gmail "only" offered a gigabyte, I remember reading right here on Slashdot about a software tool that used the storage as a (very slow) online disk drive. So this has been going on almost as long as Gmail has been around.
These days, Google encourages these uses, with Google Drive
Re: If it's free, you are the product (Score:2)
My email takes about 13GB. No large attachments. How is it abuse to utilize the service that's offered ?
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When was the last time you really felt like Google was innovating on their Gmail product?
Does enshittification count as innovation or is that a separate category? If the former, then within the last week. If the latter then... I dunno, can't really remember back that far.
Re:If it's free, you are the product (Score:5, Interesting)
Profits have never been higher, and yet their offering continues to get worse..
I doubt that the product is actually getting worse, and I have good reason for my doubt.
Nearly all of the things like this that Google does have one real purpose: Combating abuse. During my ~15 years at Google I never worked on counter-abuse, but I spend about a decade doing stuff that led me to work pretty closely with the counter-abuse teams, and the inventiveness of the people abusing Google's products and systems never ceased to amaze me. And it isn't trivial abuse that is ignorable, because not preventing the abuse would actually make the product offerings worse.
I don't know what the storage abuse might be, but I can think of a lot of things that could be done, and my experience touching on counter-abuse at Google taught me that for every thing I can think of, there are people out there who can think of a hundred more, and will then invest serious amounts of time and money in implementing them.
One of my favorite examples was related to Android GPS location. It's a favorite mostly because of how trivial it was, but the vast resources abusers poured into it, and I'm sure they only did it because they got even more out of it -- this large-scale abuse is all for-profit. For a long time it was easy to spoof your location without giving any evidence of the fact. This caused problems for location-based games like Pokemon Go or Ingres, who lost players because it screwed up the game[*]. So, the games started checking if the device was in developer mode, which allowed "legitimate" location spoofing. So cheaters started using bootloader-unlocked devices which they could configure to lie about being in developer mode. So games started using Android Keystore attestation (I wrote Keystore, hence why I got pulled in) to make it difficult to impossible to do that. Except that some number of official attestation keys leaked out of factories and people found they could get those and fake out the games. Also, there were some crappy devices that didn't do the Keystore security right. If you bought one of those cheap devices and modified the software, you could cheat
To this point, it's fine. Just normal security cat-and-mouse, and it keeps the number of cheaters small enough not to matter, so it's fine. But someone decided to scale it, for a fee. Someone (or some ones) set up massive device farms. One organization made some mistakes that leaked a bit of device information and allowed us to count the devices in the farm and there were tens of thousands. What did they do? They arranged to help Pokemon Go players spoof their location. If you played Pokemon Go and wanted to cheat, you could pay $5 per month and they'd give you a customized version of the game that would let you spoof your location but whenever the game asked for an attestation it would get one from one of the farm devices, all of which were hacked to be able to lie about their configuration.
That's just one example, and there are an unbelievable number of others. I recently chatted with a friend on the counter-abuse team and they are really tearing their hair out over some of the incredibly clever attacks people are mounting with AI. She couldn't give me details (and if she had, I couldn't share them).
Anyway, what's really going on here, I'm sure, is that there's some large-scale, systematic abuse of GMail storage that is to a degree that it's costing Google hundreds of millions of dollars. What exactly, I have no idea. And they think that they can address it by reducing storage for people who won't take a simple step to prove that they're real people (phone number verification). Obviously, phone number verification doesn't prove that you're a real person... but it increases the cost of large-scale abuse, and that's the point. I'm sure there will be other I'm-a-person verification schemes so those without phones have an option, but all of them will aim to inconvenience abusers and increase their costs, without too-greatly inconveniencing legitimate users.
[*] My personal experience: I played Ingres quite a lot for a couple of years, but quit it completely after one cheating event, and never went back. I spent a whole day climbing a 10,000-foot mountain peak, covered in deep snow, in the dead of winter, to capture a key portal, only to have it taken away from me 30 minutes later by someone who definitely didn't climb the mountain. I know because if they'd been there, I'd have seen them. Pissed me off so bad I deleted the app and never installed it again.
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This is a really interesting comment, thanks!
While I doubt the motivations of the people at the top, I too have spent some time in big tech (not google) and bloody hell the sheer inventiveness of people trying to fuck with it for evil is never ending.
And there's literally nothing people won't do to make ill gotten gains.
My personal experience
Not a gamer myself these days, but yeah cheaters suck. It basically destroys that entire segment of products. Google's customers don't want cheating, the game makers do
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I'm still going to be really pissed off if google do successfully kill F-droid though.
I don't think Google has any intention or desire to kill F-droid -- and here I really understand the situation quite deeply from my decade in Android Security. I worked on platform security, not the anti-malware team, but I knew a lot of the core anti-malware guys and talked to them regularly. I was the twelfth engineer to join the Android Security team back when one small team was responsible for all of it (platform, anti-malware and offensive/red-team), so I knew the anti-malware guys (all three of them
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I don't think Google has any intention or desire to kill F-droid
I think it's very likely to get caught in the crossfire. I don't think f-droid is big enough that anyone except engineers at google even know about its existence let alone care.
But damnit I care!
Don't get me wrong, I don't think google leadership is non-evil or altruistic, but I don't think F-droid is on their radar at all. I do get that tying something to a real-world ID and money is harder to scale, much harder and malware is a pretty low mar
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I don't think Google has any intention or desire to kill F-droid
I think it's very likely to get caught in the crossfire. I don't think f-droid is big enough that anyone except engineers at google even know about its existence let alone care.
At Google, it's what the engineers care about that really matters. Google is still very much a bottom-up company. And, in any case, even if no special allowances are made for F-droid, it's very easy for F-droid to stay in operation under the proposed terms. As I said, it just means someone is going to have to pony up $25 and provide their ID. That doesn't even have to happen for each app; F-droid as an organization could become the official "developer" who signs all of the apps.
I really don't see a ri
Re: If it's free, you are the product (Score:2)
Thatâ(TM)s a super helpful comment and a valuable reframe, I appreciate that.
But if you need a game as an incentive to make a challenging trek, youâ(TM)re doing it wrong.
Google *really* wants your phone number. (Score:2)
with users able to unlock the standard 15GB by adding a phone number.
Seems like a good reason not to give it to them.
Who cares? You don't need 5GB of storage! (Score:1, Flamebait)
Re: Who cares? You don't need 5GB of storage! (Score:5, Informative)
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I agree with your first point about hygiene-- and TLDR: That's WORK and doesn't work so well in some cases... That's why people "need" 5GB of mail.
THE 1 %:
I think we agree on the 1% of emails/photos you need. There are emails I've lost to time (pre-Gmail) that I would love to have back.
( Every now and again I do go back to look some friend up or something that I haven't emailed in years -- people do have lifetime events that make it so you want to get together once every 10 years (think reunions, or spec
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Re: Who cares? You don't need 5GB of storage! (Score:1)
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This is an excellent point. Especially because text is highly redundant and they can chunk things up and replace pieces that exist in another email/file with a placeholder to the same raw data rather than replicate things over and over again. Potentially TB's of email can be stored on GB's of disk this way.
Re:Who cares? You don't need 5GB of storage! (Score:4, Interesting)
"You don't need mass email storage, 99.X% of emails are useless, and should be deleted, for 99.99% of people. If you need more than 5GB of email storage, why? Can you come up with a reason that isn't just fear of losing your horde of garbage? Don't use the legal excuse, that a lawyer might ask for an email some day, that's BS and you know it! Don't use the "I might have to reference email X later on", excuse, you'll know if it's important enough to keep."
You are right on the original point but your debunking of 'excuses' falls flat. First the legal requirement to retain email isn't something you can just ignore because you doubt some lawyer will ask for it. Destroying communications you have a legal requirement to retain for X number of years can land you massive fines or much much worse. Claiming you'll probably get away with it is not a valid reason for breaking the law.
Also, Gmail was touted as unlimited email with no need to delete, only archive. You can 'star' email as important. I've had my gmail account since the unlimited storage beta and while I don't often dig for old emails it does happen; sometimes even a decade old and the emails I'm hunting for are often emails that I didn't think would be important at the time and therefore did not 'star' as important.
"How much storage could the world recover, is people pruned their fucking emails to stop being landfills? Honestly, how much? It's in the Exabytes, probably."
You could get a shiny new 6TB HDD with 5yr warranty for $200 3yrs ago. That's 120 50GB email accounts. If even one of those 120 people accesses one old email during that half decade the drive has almost certainly paid for itself; that's true even if it just saved them a couple hours finding that data elsewhere. Hardware is CHEAP. Storage is CHEAP. Either is effectively infinitely scalable. Time is not only expensive; it also doesn't always scale.
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You are right on the original point but your debunking of 'excuses' falls flat. First the legal requirement to retain email isn't something you can just ignore because you doubt some lawyer will ask for it. Destroying communications you have a legal requirement to retain for X number of years can land you massive fines or much much worse. Claiming you'll probably get away with it is not a valid reason for breaking the law.
There is no legal requirement to keep old junk emails. If you're doing something that might turn into a contract or legal matter, maybe, but how much of your email is legally relevant to anything? My point was that 100% of your email is not legally relevant, and I would bet less than 1% is. It's probably not 0%, but it's not 100, 50, or even 25%, I would be shocked if anyone except a law firm or judge broke 10%..
You could get a shiny new 6TB HDD with 5yr warranty for $200 3yrs ago. That's 120 50GB email accounts. If even one of those 120 people accesses one old email during that half decade the drive has almost certainly paid for itself; that's true even if it just saved them a couple hours finding that data elsewhere. Hardware is CHEAP. Storage is CHEAP. Either is effectively infinitely scalable. Time is not only expensive; it also doesn't always scale.
I'll assume a 50 GB email load, if 10 million people have that much email that's 50 x 10 00
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"There is no legal requirement to keep old junk emails."
See the problem with talking out your ass is that you are often wrong. There may be no legal requirement for YOU to retain emails/communications. That doesn't make it some universal truth.
Sure — there are quite a few. Common examples:
Financial services
SEC Rule 17a-4 — broker-dealers must retain electronic communications (email, IM, chat) for 3 years, first 2 in easily accessible storage, in WORM (write-once-read-many) format
FINRA Rule 4511
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I answered the legal/compliance point seperately.
"I'll assume a 50 GB email load, if 10 million people have that much email that's 50 x 10 000 000 or 500 000 000 GB of email, which is also 500 PB, a 1/2 EB of email, that is most likely almost worthless. Where do you store 1/2 a EB? Why store 1/2 a EB of effective digital toilet paper? That's just email, now think about photos, videos, and cloud drive usage, if you start cleaning it up, and you're honest, most of that is junk."
Of course most of it is junk bu
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"Destroying communications you have a legal requirement to retain for X number of years can land you massive fines or much much worse."
But which ones are those? A tiny percentage of the whole. Attached files that are important get downloaded and saved in the appropriate project file. Receipts get stored for six months. Everything else over 90 days gets deleted. I checked and currently my total email storage is about 25 MB.
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For YOU. https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
Indeed, who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
I also didn't want people wasting time worrying about quotas or other artificial limits unless they were abusive. (The dude who wrote something that was authing against LDAP 10s of millions of times a day got a talking-to.)
A lot of people confuse "I can't imagine doing or needing X" with "there is a good reason to deny the ability to do X." Honestly, I think most people are Doing It Wrong, most of the time. So? If they're getting shit done, none of my business until they are making unreasonable demands that impact operations. And 100G of mail is peanuts.
My current complaint is the opposite - I can't keep mail longer than a year now, lest it be discoverable in some potential future lawsuit. I've gotten better at predicting what I'll need to know later, but still miss things I should have saved somewhere, and that absolutely damages my productivity.
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do you need the 1/2 written draft from two years ago? No, no you don't,
You're wasting resources approaching the wrong problem. The question you should be asking is: Do you have the spare time to dedicate to looking for that 1/2 written draft from two years ago and make an assessment on its value, knowing full well that simply having one photograph is consuming more space than 20 of those drafts.
Most people ignore text and email for good reason, it just isn't a space user.
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Right, that's why this makes sense for Gmail. The spreadsheet says make the free tier extraction percentage number go up, and they value noncomplying users' time at zero. The math should is different for company-internal email.
The operative question should be, how much do you want to spend on employees sorting email instead of writing code or whatever you hired them to do? Because that's how you're buying your disk storage savings.
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I have an archive of all of my email going back to 1992. No plans to get rid of it.
It is organized nicely into separate folders and easily searchable. Total disk space is about 10.5GB, and seeing as I self-host my email, it's taking up 0.19% of my server's disk space. Why would I care about pruning that?
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Oh yes, sure. I've seen users whose INBOX has held tens of thousands of messages. That is simply madness.
My brother-in-law is the extreme opposite: Hundreds of specific folders and sub-folders. IMO, that's also madness.
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I used to do that; eventually decided it was a waste of time and just let my inbox grow without limit. It works fine, search finds stuff I need, and the storage consumed is trivial compared to my (fairly modest) photos. My only regret is that I used to waste time keeping my email neat as if it was like paper based storage or something.
Re:Who cares? You don't need 5GB of storage! (Score:4, Interesting)
Nonsense.
I worked at a startup in the 1980s and we had internal email from the day I started. Over a decade later I had accumulated quite a bit of email and IT decided to limit email storage to some "reasonable" (to them) value. I don't recall what it was but it was measured in MB not GB. I started getting emails to "reduce my mailbox size". I ignored those emails (although, in retrospect, I should have also deleted them in the spirit of the request!). I did this for a few months. Then my boss shows up in my office one day and asks me to reduce my mailbox size. I started doing the math for him
and which project he would like to delay while I spent time going through my email.
I didn't even make it through the entire list and I never heard another word about my use of email storage and when I left years later, it was all still there! IT of course didn't dare start bouncing email to my inbox due to exceeding storage quotas (that could have resulted in a very uncomfortable discussion between IT and whoever got the bounce notification), let alone delete any of my emails.
Of course, Google has to determine the value of my data to _them_ on "free" accounts and Google assigns zero value to my time so the math is very different (and includes other factors such as the odds of me depriving them of my data by eschewing their 5GB "free" email and the odds of me exceeding the 5GB and actually paying them their rather high prices for more storage at some future time).
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In a perfect world "preview" and what actually appears after submission would be the same and Ordered Lists would actually BE ordered lists.
But it appears we don't live in a perfect world and I'm reminded of that every time I post what should be a nicely formatted comment on /. :(
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It's fine to argue that you don't need more than 5GB - I don't know you and would certainly not, unless asked, attempt to judge how much email you need,
However, your needs, let alone your desires, are unlikely to be the same as others. They may not even be the same as the majority of others, let alone most other people.
People have very different patterns of professional and social interactions. For example, the email storage needs of someone with a tiny circle of friends is likely quite different than so
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Actually, 15GB isn't enough for me.
I can't afford to delete emails, except spam. I never know when I'll need an email that I received 10 years ago. In one case, such an old email literally helped me get a job. Other times, what someone said or didn't say, can cost money.
Finally, who has time to manually filter through every email to determine if it's something we want to keep or not, or file it in an organized way? Not me! To me, the time that would waste, is worth more than the little bit of money I pay Go
Next step: you pay for it (Score:2)
Clearly the Google LLM investments are not panning out...
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Or they need to repurpose storage from Gmail to Gemini because new hardware is too expensive...
Google Drive and Gmail share space. (Score:4, Insightful)
Time to have duplicate backups of both which all users should do anyway.
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For mail why not just POP to download copies, and automatically remove all email older than a certain time?
In my experience Google deliberately tries to break this every couple of months. Google doesn't want people to look after their own data.
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Oh... really?
So all those .mbox, .eml, and .emlx files I have both on my Time Machine drive and in my Backblaze account are what... exactly? Figments of my imagination? Well, I must have that Twilight Zone superpower where my imagination becomes real. Because I can most definitely retrieve and view those files and the access mail that is in them. Or... perhaps the air in the room I'm in is filled with atomized LSD and ketamine vapor and even the ability to retrieve and view my backups is also a figment
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Try explaining to people that drive/gmail isn't a backup first. Expect questions like "Why then does my phone say it is backing up to Drive?"
Not only is for most people the cloud their idea and concept of a backup, most backup software including Android and iOS's internal ones are telling them that. You're not going to convince people to backup their backup.
15GB. Pfft! (Score:2)
My primary account has 17GB of free storage.
And thanks to extensive use of a Pixel 4a, I have over 100GB of photos stored in this account.
$10 for 2TB is a no-brainer for me. (Score:2)
I back up all my databases to Gdrive daily.
Plus it gives Google a reason not to kick me off their product which would honestly be catastrophic for me at this point.
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One of the reasons I pro-actively de-Googled my life [skoll.ca]. I don't want to be at the mercy of some faceless corporation's AI deciding to fire me as a "customer".
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One of the reasons I pro-actively de-Googled my life [skoll.ca]. I don't want to be at the mercy of some faceless corporation's AI deciding to fire me as a "customer".
Good for you, and thanks for sharing your tips. I'm trying to leave Google too, though it's easier for me because pretty much all that's left is gmail. Google's calendar has always seemed too flaky for me, it never handles time zones properly. Though to be fair, the behaviour I want from international time zones is often subject to change :-) A paper diary is actually the best compromise for my current level of complexity.
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I'd love to, but I eat meat, I'm an atheist, and I do own a TV (though it doesn't get all that much use...)
Re:$10 for 2TB is a no-brainer for me. (Score:4, Insightful)
There are enough public instances of people losing their Google account due to Google's policy and automation that this is likely a very bad idea.
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Wrong interpretation of statistics. Backups are hard. Data management is hard. Literally every single person here on Slashdot will be able to tell a story of data loss that hasn't been publicly expressed in the media. Most users fuck this up.
Yet Google is a big public company so complaints about their service tends to get public attention. While quite a few prominent instances of losing Google accounts exists, in the context of 2 billion monthly active users it's an incredibly "safe bet" for your data.
5GB doesn't seem like much... (Score:2)
But I just looked at my personal Maildir which has all my emails from back in 1996 and it's only 3.5GB in size. I suspect if you need 15GB you're probably a business (which shouldn't be relying on a free service), or really bad at deleting junk (maybe Google will help you here).
Re:5GB doesn't seem like much... (Score:4, Informative)
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or really bad at deleting junk (maybe Google will help you here).
In my experience Google has got worse at this lately. Gmail will hide all the routine emails from linkedin or various loyalty accounts into the "promotions" or "social" tabs. So they never show up in your primary inbox, where they are more likely to be deleted. Gmail will also auto-move emails after some arbitrary amount of time, for example payal receipts disappear from my primary inbox after a few days, I think they get migrated to "shopping."
Google wants you to hit your storage limit, but to be so depen
Why not give them a phone number? (Score:1)
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detecting which assholes are creating multiple email accounts
What's wrong with multiple email accounts? Seems like sensible digital hygiene to me.
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in fact, a phone number is the worst way of doing 2FA; and google has several superior methods available. They actually won't let you set up phone number 2FA unless you set up another method first.
Google's hard-on for collecting phone numbers is entirely due to the fact they're and ad company and it's valuable data collection.
Ditched Gmail (Score:2)
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I self-host. It's not free; I pay about $8/month for a cloud VM that's my MX host and mail filter. The actual IMAP server is a Raspberry Pi in my house. I'm guessing the total hardware cost was about $500 (it has two 6TB USB drives in RAID-1 as the main storage) and it uses about $0.75 worth of electricity per month. I expect the hardware to last at least 5 years, so all in it's about $17/month for as many mailboxes as I like as well as total control and (essentially) unlimited storage.
Infinity plus one (Score:3)
Remember when they advertised Gmail as having storage that grows with you? Infinity plus one storage?
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I remember those days well.
Remember when they instituted quotas -- but the quota counter just ticked up continuously as time passed regardless if you were using or logged on to gmail (or other google products)?
I knew it was too good to last even though storage was, back in the day before AI demand, getting substantially cheaper almost continuously except for short intervals where there were market/supply disruptions.
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Pay up if you want more. When my kids got smartphones, I upgraded to google one. Now that space is filling up too. Reason? Kids do not prune their photos and movies. Looks like they are going to get educated on maintaining their photo's.
Probably thanks to AI (Score:2)
AI has pushed the prices of storage through the roof, so... thanks, AI! I'm betting that's what's behind this.
Datacenter madness reversed Moore's Law (Score:2)
Chips and storage are getting more expensive, reversing Moore's-Law-like trends. I know, technically that's not the definition, but the "feel" is a reversal of the usual gradual price drops per unit of computing or storage over time.
Eroom's Law: Bubbles f$ck things up.
Anyone else remember when... (Score:3)
no big news (Score:2)
I can say two things:
1. for years Google is pushing you hard to enter a phone number when making an account, not impossible but the average user won't manage to skip the requirement
2. most Google accounts are made when people set up their Android phone for use on that phone.
I'm old (Score:2)
I'm old enough to remember when Gmail promised "unlimited storage".
Gmail & Drive Need Improved Features (Score:3)
Gmail & Drive need improvements to control file size management and to enable backups.
1. Gmail needs to add the ability to delete large attachments while keeping the email text. A workaround is forwarding the email to yourself with a slightly different subject line and delete the attachment, but it should be much more convenient than that.
2. Drive should allow Google-Doc and Google-Sheets files to be downloaded in their native format (or in a zip file) for backup. And enable them to be uploaded again. Forcing users to export them as docx and xlsx files is a stupid lock-in tactic. Converting back and forth somewhat mangles the files on each conversion. Gdoc-docx and gss-xlsx conversion aren't perfect and require human fixups.
3. Hint: Lock a docx or xlsx file when it is uploaded to G-Drive so it is not auto-mangled when someone clicks on it for viewing. Google should allow multiple files to be selected and locked at one time rather than require people to lock them one at a time.
4. Useful feature hint: Upload a photo of text to Drive and open it as a Doc, and it will do OCR and convert the photo to a text document.
Don't you remember their promise? (Score:2)
At launch they claimed: Unlimited storage, never delete a mail again
15 GB is not unlimited and over the years users probably had to delete quite a few mails since then.
Re: (Score:2)
"I have altered the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further."
So... (Score:2)
...people will have to buy 10 empty simcards on ebay for $1 to receive an SMS?
Market Shift? (Score:2)
I'm thinking they noticed all the people leaving Gmail for paid services, and the message they took away from that was:
"People are willing to pay for email"
Instead of,
"People are willing to pay to get away from Google."
How long has it stagnated at 15GB? (Score:2)