Technology 17 Aug 2006 09:49 am
I will run out of Gmail space on September 28, 2028
I've been using Gmail since November 13, 2004. Before then, I was loathe to have anything stored on a remote server that I didn't directly control: be that photos, email, documents, whatever. I always wanted a local copy.
And webmail sucked: Hotmail and Yahoo didn't give you enough space, and besides that, the interface was clunky and slow. You couldn't really interact with multiple emails very easily.
It didn't hurt, of course, that I had lost about 500MB of email in a catastrophic Windows corruption thanks to some minor overclocking that I was experimenting with. That really sucked. Thank God all of my documents and media were on two non-system drives. I lost my iTunes ratings, playcounts, playlists, etc. Toast. In a matter of minutes. Worst of all, though, was my lost email. Irreplaceable.
Then I actually bothered to play with Gmail, having received an invitation months earlier but never done anything with it. I discovered that "conversations" — sort of like forum threads in chronological order — were freakin' awesome. (Screenshot.) And labels. What? An email can be in more than one place? No way! 1GB storage? Phat.
And of course Google doubled that amount of storage to 2GB on Gmail's second birthday. And then some time later they started increasing that storage automatically. First pretty quickly, and then they started slowing the rate of new storage. But it's still going up.
I found this nifty page which calculates when you'll run out of Gmail storage based on how long you've had a Gmail account, and how full it is now.
Of course that really means that I'll never run out of Gmail storage. Which I rather knew anyway. The rate at which I add email to my account is greatly decreased these days because I don't save every little notification I receive anymore. I've always been a deleter, but I don't feel a need to save those lovely little ING emails telling me that my interest rate has gone up. (Because really, I don't care.) Same for my daily comics page and forum digests.
Nonetheless, this was a fun little experiment.
