Google vows to increase Gmail storage limit

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(IDG News Service) -- "People using Google Inc.'s Gmail service are sucking up storage space faster than the company can add it.

Google said on Friday it is speeding up the rate at which it adds storage space for its Gmail Web-based e-mail service due to the increased storage requirements for attachments such as photos.

"A few of you are using Gmail so much that you're running out of space, so to make good on our promise, today we're announcing we are speeding up our counter and giving out more free storage," wrote Rob Siemborski, a Google engineer on the Gmail blog.

On Friday, the counter on the Gmail login page stood at more than 2,935MB, or about 2.9GB, of storage, and was rising, but the counter is an illustration rather than a hard limit.

Google started gradually increasing Gmail storage in April 2005 when the service turned one year old. Google's Gmail was immediately popular when it launched in 2004, offering free accounts with 1GB of storage, but this year has been surpassed by its rivals.

Microsoft Corp. upped its free storage limit for its Windows Live Hotmail service to 5GB in August, and Yahoo Inc. started offered "unlimited" storage in May."

:source: Source: ComputerWorld
:view: View: Neowin.Net
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I noticed my ticker has been increasing...Currently @ 3153 MB.

next is to increase the storage on their photo service.

Those chaps over at Neowin are arguing over the same thing.

photo storage is only 1 gig. That adds up fast with today's photo sizes. I take and share a lot of pictures and there's no way I'll pay for adding more storage. I'll just go back to sending 5 or 6 emails again.

I don't use gmail for the storage capacity (although it is a nice bonus), but rather for it's marvelous UI! I have used many email accounts in the past (and still do for various things), but none compare to gmail's ease of use. It's accessibility to options, advanced email search, and efficient spam collector, address auto-complete and google chat are just a few of the reasons I stick with gmail :)