WOW! 2GB on gmail

I am probably the last one who doesn't have a Gmail.. Why do you need 2 GB email storage for? Sending movies? :D

It's not really that big of a deal to me, because you're still limited on how big of a file you can actually send, and I download my gmail into Mail.app anyways, so it's like I've got 10gb of storage. But still cool that there's a little shootout between Yahoo and Google going on.

Its like "Wow! Thats amazing!" at the moment, but it's really just a marketing gimmick. There seems to be a small, small group of users that actually do use most of taht space, but really its just to make things easier to archive.

I just read an article at milkbasilica.com about how Google compresses stuff to fit. It seems true...a 200 gig drive like mine for instance would only serve 90 members. It still costs $150. :idea:

Quote:

Mail providers know it. They finally know the fact that compressed 1GB worth of text doesn't take up space at all. They also know that not many people actually have 1GB worth of un-compressed text of emails. They know, GMail attracts so many people, geek or non-geek, that they want to start their own "gigabyte mail campaign" to start catching up with Google.

Despite some contrary belief, Google's GMail was not the first gigabyte mail service. Spymac, provided a gigabyte email long before GMail did; and still does. I even heard about some company who started with 1 terabyte email accounts then... quickly fell apart. (Wasn't a too wise decision, eh? :P) However, seems like every uber-cool people have Google, and they love it! Despite the fact that GMail is currently under beta testing and uses invitation-based system, many people seek for GMail. Whether it be invites from geek friends, families, or even gmail swap forums; people have it! The popularity of such large storage email service lead Yahoo!, Hotmail, and several once-upon-a-time email giants to try to compete with Google. However...

Sorry to tell Yahoo!, Hotmail or any other email giants; competition is good, but people are too lazy to switch back to Yahoo! or Hotmail, AGAIN! Even if they provided users with 2GB of email, we are warm and cozy with our GMail. Not to mention the fact that GMail is mostly text-based, so dial-up users are really happy with the load time. (Let's say, compared to bloated Hotmail?) Who really is going to switch their email just because Yahoo! or Hotmail provides the same storage size email service? I'm not going to inform everybody that suddenly my email changed again. I am also pretty sure that Yahoo! or Hotmail doesn't have nice archive, search, conversation-style, and other spiffy features like GMail. It will just be a storage-upgrade, and the web-interface to access it will be the same. (I'm pretty sure on this, as both companies are unreliable.)

Let's get some geek facts straight before we end this. First, IF Yahoo! is actually doing a favor by giving you a 250MB account for free, and 2GB of account for only $19.99/year; let's see how much storage space it takes them to provide such service to you. Yes, it is not 250MB for each account. If it was, it would be a disaster for them. This means, assuming no-RAID, no-fancy, no-binary-conversion, no-others, if you have a 250GB hard drive, you can only provide 1000 people with such email service. I am pretty sure Yahoo! has more than a thousand. Now, if we add in the factor of backup, RAID drive modules, servers, maintenance, etc..... whew.. $$$. But this is not the case, obviously. If you are provided with 250MB of free email account, they actually compress your emails to save space. 250MB of randomly generated text file, when compressed with no fancy stuff other than good'ol Unix tar.gz, you only get 1.4MB. Their actual storage spent on you is only 1.4MB, NOT 250MB. This means they provide 178,571 people with 250MB accounts in one 200GB Hard drive. Yea, you now get the numbers.... It's a lucrative business! Let's say you had the good ol'Hotmail's 2MB account. Their actual storage spent on you is only, 13.3KB! Yes, that means 15,037,593 people with 2MB of free email account on a 200gb hard drive. Hotmail users? Sorry to tell you, but this really sucks, doesn't it?

So what exactly is Gmail giving you? Gmail is giving you a 1GB Email account which is only about 5.6MB when compressed. I suspect most email-giants compress the text files, which is highly compressible, to store users' emails. (Mm... may be not Hotmail, because they are dumb like that :P no offense) Not to mention that no user actually has 1GB worth of text emails....

tx mackie!

the only incorrect thing in this speculation is that mostly the space on the email accounts is taken up by compressed images. so, when i say i have used 100MB of my gMail, that probably translates to 80MB of images and zipped files and 20MB of text. which would mean in effect i'm only using like 81MB of space. not 5.6MB as the article mentions.

anyway, if every gMail user effectively only uses let's say 30MB in average and if the 25 million gMail userbase is true that means Google needs to have about 750K GB!

if they would use the rather cheap Xserve RAID for their storage at 2USD/1GB. it would cost them 1.5 million dollar just to buy the storage space. plus you would need processing power, bandwidth, etc.

now lets see if it's worth for them to operate gMail. let's say they get a hit on an ad every 1000 page load, which is quite realistic. if every hit pays them 0.1USD and in average every 25m user checks at least one email a day than they get 25K USD from advertising daily. that means their investment for storage will pay back in just 60 days!!! After that it's a goldmine!

Makes sense :wink:

Maybe designer-types send big files around with Gmail, but the truth is that most regular users just do text, text, text. Which in itself doesn't take up much space. That said, Google only allocates space when it's needed (obviously). So they still get a lot of profit on this.

Not quite sure what I exactly said on that article but, yes. compressed zip files and images are not as compressible as text files. However, most of the guys I know, students, only use GMail for email purposes. Also, sometimes, for attaching MS Word documents.

Other than that, email is defintely a lucrative business and GMail is almost dominating all other email providers. I fear google.

Some people are using Gmail to have an online backup of their files. Here's a blurb from OSX Hints... http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=31163

_________________________________________________
paul burd \\ multimedia designer
portfolio - www.paulburddesign.com
weblog - www.onedigitallife.com

does google want you to do backups using their Mail system? i think not.