GMail increases storage capacity to 2 GB, anticipates more

[divajess]

In celebration of the first anniversary of GMail, Google has increased the storage capacity for all GMail users to 2 GB! This is NOT in fact an April Fool's joke, because I logged in to my GMail to find the storage space going up slowly. Currently users are at about 1.4GB and they have a counter steadily going up on the GMail login page.

They have said that this is only the beginning, with plans to roll out even more storage in the future. They have also added great new features like the ability to send 10MB of pictures at a time, fonts, colors, highlighting and their new basic HTML view that supports almost every browser out there.

Thanks GMail, and Happy Birthday!!

[TadW]

Those are wonderful news. Looks like storage is not an issue of today anymore. 1GB yesterday. 2GB today. 1TB tomorrow?

And whose birthday is it? Google's?

[divajess]

It's the anniversary of GMail, apparently.

[Pride Of Lions]

A great day for everyone who needs to archive every e-mail.

I'm wondering if anyone knows of ways to use the GMail storage as online storage, or how to transfer e-mail from other accounts to GMail's archives (Yahoo!,...)? I remember back when GMail was introduced, The Screensavers had a hack on how to use the extra storage, but I didn't have an account at the time so I didn't look into it.

Either that, or perhaps this will prompt Yahoo! to up their e-mail storage limit...
POL9A

[TadW]

Originally Posted by divajess

It's the anniversary of GMail, apparently.

I thought that is what you meant, but I couldn't believe the service was one year old already. And still invite-only. Garshhhh.

[divajess]

You can use the GMail Shell Extension for filestorage. It's pretty awesome, though I wish it had a Mac version!

[divajess]

Hmmm, you know, now that I think about it, I wonder if the Linux GMail Shell Extension can be installed on a Mac using fink. Anyone know anything about that?

[Pride Of Lions]

Thanks for the heads-up, divajess. I knew there was an answer, but I should've known that it was a PC-only thing. But it's so cool that I am now considering how to incorporate it into VPC and get it going for some of my files.

Especially wonderful would be if one could send files by e-mailing links from the account to people (files bigger than the 10MB limit). I just might have to investigate this further.
POL9A

[Alexander Turcic]

For Windows, check this wonderful instruction at Engadget.

For Mac users (hi Diva!), check this and especially this (download Gmail Drive (OS X).dmg.zip) link.

[divajess]

Alex, you are my hero. I am so trying that out when I get home from LA next week!

[Gatton]

Originally Posted by TadW

I thought that is what you meant, but I couldn't believe the service was one year old already. And still invite-only. Garshhhh.

For some reason I had thought the service was no longer in beta and was now open to everyone. I could have sworn I heard that but when I went to the page it still says beta and there's no sign up option. Oh well. It's hard to believe nowadays that anyone who wants an account wouldn't have one.

I have had my account for a while and to be honest I rarely use it. I think I just have been lazy about getting familiar with the interface. More than that though is that I have never really liked using email through a browser. I mainly use Fastmail.fm as an IMAP account with Thunderbird.

Is anyone here using Gmail as their main account? Has it supplanted the other big webmail provicers like Yahoo and Hotmail for you? Interesting how they are following suit increasing features. Although to me storage space is about the least desireable feature as 99% of the email I archive are plain text and take up so little space.

[cbarnett]

Heh. up to 2052MB quota and climbing... I wonder how much they're spending on storage (and backups!)

Craig.

[cbarnett]

Originally Posted by Gatton

Is anyone here using Gmail as their main account? Has it supplanted the other big webmail provicers like Yahoo and Hotmail for you? Interesting how they are following suit increasing features. Although to me storage space is about the least desireable feature as 99% of the email I archive are plain text and take up so little space.

Gmail is my primary mail account since I got it months ago. I check my old Yahoo address periodically, but gmail is the bomb! I love the way it organises my mail, and going back to old fashioned email is a bit of a chore now, I must admit.

Craig.

[hacker]

Just remember that anything you put on GMail's storage, whether in email, email attachments, or files copied there with the "GMail Shell Extension", is owned by Google.

Their TOS clearly outlines this. Just be careful.

[Pride Of Lions]

Originally Posted by Gatton

Is anyone here using Gmail as their main account? Has it supplanted the other big webmail provicers like Yahoo and Hotmail for you? Interesting how they are following suit increasing features. Although to me storage space is about the least desireable feature as 99% of the email I archive are plain text and take up so little space.

I have different identities on the internet (personal, 2 businesses) so I can have different accounts for the different newsletters and such that I receive. I don't have to worry about tying up storage space on my hard drive or wondering whether an e-mail is important enough to keep or delete because of the archive feature. And the killer application for me is the POP access so that I don't have to go into the website to check my e-mail. Yahoo! is a bummer in these ways because the free version has the smaller storage (although they felt the Gmail heat and upped it some) so I had to delete certain e-mails and the lack of POP access meant I had to log in to Yahoo! when I wanted to check e-mail.

Originally Posted by hacker

Just remember that anything you put on GMail's storage, whether in email, email attachments, or files copied there with the "GMail Shell Extension", is owned by Google.

A valuable point to keep in mind.
POL9A