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View Full Version : Since when have online email services offered 5GB storage space?



user1397
November 8th, 2007, 04:13 AM
I just noticed that apart from some minor GUI enhancements to gmail, it now says its got 4.7 GB of storage space and counting...and windows live hotmail supposedly gives you 5GB to start off with.

Just a while ago 2GB seemed like so much...

-grubby
November 8th, 2007, 04:15 AM
I would never use over 100 MB of space

kast
November 8th, 2007, 04:15 AM
Yeah man its been awhile, I use inbox.com and they have been up at 5G for a long time.

Not that I come close to using it :)

Lostincyberspace
November 8th, 2007, 04:17 AM
I have both types pretty full but I do forward my smaller accounts to them. I also don't delete emails I have never seen a reason yet.

Warpnow
November 8th, 2007, 04:25 AM
You are currently using 323 MB (6%) of your 4722 MB.

Yeah, I doubt I'll ever hit 1gb even...

I've had that account for several years.

SomeGuyDude
November 8th, 2007, 04:28 AM
I believe Yahoo! mail has been unlimited storage for a while now.

Polygon
November 8th, 2007, 05:16 AM
regular emails are literally just text...so unless your sending/reciving pretty big attachments i doubt anyone would use 5 gb......

but there are a lot of programs that work with gmail as a virtual drive, i think there is a driver for linux as well

adam.tropics
November 8th, 2007, 07:39 AM
regular emails are literally just text...so unless your sending/reciving pretty big attachments i doubt anyone would use 5 gb......


I'm fairly sure that if every account holder suddenly decided to use the full 5gb....well, there might perhaps be a problem. I mean they must work it on the likely usage patterns rather than strict users*5gb surely?!

toupeiro
November 8th, 2007, 07:53 AM
I'm fairly sure that if every account holder suddenly decided to use the full 5gb....well, there might perhaps be a problem. I mean they must work it on the likely usage patterns rather than strict users*5gb surely?!

Most of these mail servers use single instance de-duplication to help keep the actual data footprint at a minimum.. What that means is they are using NAS or SAN devices (or de-duplicating within a database like MS-Exchange) that are comparing the data blocks of two files, and if they are the same, they are removing the duplicate blocks and replacing them with pointers to one set of blocks for a particular piece of data. Doing things like that greatly reduces the cost of a gigabyte to the company. It's worth more to a company like google, for example, to give you an enormous amount of space in order to use context based advertising using your inbox as search criteria. If you never have to delete emails, they never run out of advertisement opportunities.