Winning at GMail

By Jake • August 12th, 2010 • 6 Comments

By way of John Gruber, Mike Monteiro has finished the GMail game by successfully using up its storage, which amounts to 8.19 GB.

An irony pointed out by a commenter, GMail does boast “Who needs to delete when you have so much storage?!” in its Trash folder.

When GMail launched, its storage limits were fantastically high, and many wondered if that much email could ever be achieved and how Google could scale up to millions of users.

Moot point now, but Google has since changed its “infinite” storage lately. Each service now caps the amount of free storage you can use, e.g. Picasa allows 1 GB for free.

You can purchase additional storage from Google, which I believe Chet (@oraclenerd) did, and the prices are very reasonable, ranging from $5/year for 20 GB up to $256/year for 1 TB.

Anyway, found this funny because of several reasons, and it’s an interesting switch in mindset. In the old days, I had to delete mail and file it locally to stay under my quota; GMail trained that out of me.

Email is JIC tool, so no one really wants to have to decide what to save and what to trash.

Random thoughts really. Care to add perspective or make a cohesive argument?

Find the comments.


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  • http://twitter.com/theappslab/statuses/20990745375 theappslab (theappslab)

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    Winning at GMail [link to post]

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  • Pradip c

    Just a thought how long does it take to search a mail when your mail box is full. How is the performance. :-)

  • http://twitter.com/syd_oracle Gary Myers

    Still stuck in your ‘old days’. Today my work mailbox is telling me I’m at 482 MB out of my 600MB limit. But I also work off-site, and am not allowed to store work stuff except on the company network. So I have no choice but to throw stuff away PERMANENTLY.

  • http://theappslab.com Jake

    I don’t use very much of the free storage, so it’s snappy for me. I’ve heard others complain though.

  • http://theappslab.com Jake

    That’s just bad business practice IMO. Email is used for legal proceedings and can be subpoenaed, and many companies are required by local laws to retain email to meet certain standards. I can’t believe you’re forced to keep such a small inbox.

    I assume this isn’t *your* policy :)