Something Fishy Going on with Google's Gmail (No, This is NOT an April Fools Joke)
By David Johnston, Contributing Writer, RealTechNews.com
There is an article on the Inquirer today stating that Gmail is increasing its email storage to 2GB and will continue raising this cap in the future since storage comes cheap nowadays, though one has to ask how cheap it is to literally double the huge amount of storage that Google has keeping in mind that they should be using redundancy so they have to buy at least twice as much space as they use (and probably much, much more).
I must say I'm skeptical as to whether this is real news or an April 1 joke, however to test this story's truthfulness I took a visit to my Gmail inbox (normally I just use the free POP access feature with my regular email program, Thunderbird). To my surprise, since just two days ago my inbox capacity has been increased from 1000MB to 1374MB. This is still shy of 2GB, but it does appear that Google is making a move to increase capacity. This is good news for all of those email junkies out there who have been complaining about running out of space on Gmail which claims that you'll never have to delete another email again. I'd heard, however, that people who actually did overflow the 1GB limit were not penalized in any way and continued to be able to send and receive new email so perhaps this was the plan all along. I'm currently only using 90MB of my Gmail inbox, but I'm sure I'll appreciate the increase some day.
UPDATE ON GMAIL: The story on the Inquirer can be confirmed by visiting the Gmail website where they have a meter that shows the size of everyone's Gmail inbox steadily increasing until it hits the new 2GB limit. You can confirm this at both www.gmail.com and here.
Remember that Gmail is exactly 1 year old today. Something tells me that this is no joke!
Yeah, they doing a continuous increase instead of all at once. I wonder if they'll stop at 2GB, since at the current rate it seems like by midnight it maybe be a bit over 2GB. Of course, that depends on your time zone I guess ;)
It's hard to tell what is or isn't a joke at Google these days—weather, etc. Spencer Katt had a funny April fool's joke about Microsoft trying to knock off the linux penguin—it cracked me up— http://blog.ziffdavis.com/katt/
By David Johnston,