Is it too little too late for Gmail?

Rob Siemborski, Gmail Engineer, wrote in the official Gmail blog on Friday that "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."

I have just checked my account and, yes, the storage limit has now gone up to 3Gb which is nice. Unfortunately for Gmail, not as nice Microsoft with its Windows Live Hotmail service which recently raised its own free webmail storage limit to 5Gb. Or, indeed, Yahoo which has been offering an unlimited storage option for webmail users since May.

So while Gmail may well have the high ground as far as sheer ease of use is concerned, when it comes to storage it is starting to slip way behind. This could be vitally important as the free mail market demands the capacity to store photo, video and other data so increasingly commonly attached to messages. It will be interesting to see how much the storage counter mentioned by Rob does speed up by. Currently it has been rising by between 0.4Mb per day, and unless it at least doubles that I cannot see it making much of an impact on high volume users. And I doubt that it will rise that much simply for economic reasons. Storage capacity costs money, and Gmail is looking to monetize the storage side of its mail service. Which is why if you do need that extra capacity you can buy it from $20 a year for 10Gb rising to $500 for 400Gb.

[>shadow<]

Hmm, Its google, Im sure they can afford to up themselves at least 6 or 7 gig just to keep in the competition

To most of us, It doesnt matter, 3 gig seems to be enough but more would be nice for peace of mind and laughter

[jwenting]

hmm, my Hotmail account stores an average of 5 messages (not counting spam and other disposables).
My main account at home is under 300MB.
I wonder why anyone would need that much storage space (unless it is to store all the movies and mp3s they get sent by friends).

[John A]

I agree with jwenting. I just checked now, and my main Gmail account has used a grand total of 40 megabytes. Unless you're sending hundreds of photos in RAW format to yourself (and not deleting them), there's almost no reason you'd need that much storage.

[peter_budo]

I just stop using gmail as there is to much spamn coming in. It is two if not three times more then I recieve on my yahoo account.

[happygeek]

Well I don't use it to store MP3 or movie files, but I do use my Gmail account as a backup system, and one that is easy to access from pretty much any device and any where. All email to both my business and personal POP3 boxes gets forwarded to Gmail, attachments included (documents mainly, although magazine copy includes images in zipped archives), and my account is currently showing I am using just over 2Gb of my 3Gb allowance.

However, I think the point here is that the trend amongst your Joe Consumer types is that webmail is increasingly being used to move around and archive media files, hence the need for more storage capacity and also hence the charging structure that Google has introduced.

I still think that it is in danger of losing trade if it ignores the free storage issue while others in the same space are not.

[ke4jcd]

I use gmail, but I get allot of Spam, and It's much more then I receive on my yahoo account. I prefer yahoo mail new format over gmail too. ;) But keep trying gmail you may get it right one day. :)

[happygeek]

Oddly enough, I don't have a spam issue with Gmail as the built-in anti-spam filtering seems to be very efficient. So, yes, I get a lot of spam but I don't see it. Just empty the junk folder every week to keep the volume down.

[blud]

Yahoo is the worst e-mail program out there, and hotmail isn't much better. From personal experience, if I used Yahoo I would be worried about the messages I *didn't* get. If you ask any mail system administrator out there to look at their e-mail error logs, they will find a good majority (willing to be 70+%) of mail they send to yahoo, will be defered at LEAST once. Some systems I've seen upwards of 95%. If you are just wanting space, and/or design, that's great, but I would like to be sure that my e-mail is actually making it to me.

[Fast]

I'm using Gmail and it is working good for me. I'm receiving all the spams in the spam folder and I have to do nothing with that.