Working Around Gmail’s Quota
Wednesday, January 4th 2006 | Ismael Ghalimi
I have been using Gmail to aggregate all my email accounts since October 14, 2005. Even though I delete all incoming spam, I collected 459 MB worth of email, which amounts to 17% of Gmail’s current 2681 MB quota. Assuming that Google does not accelerate the rate at which email quota gets increased (0.3456 MB a day) and that my email usage patterns do not change (5.530 MB a day), I reckon that I should run out of space in about 429 days, or sometime in early 2007.
Now, if I start using Gmail as a file storage facility and double my daily email usage (about 11 MB a day), I will run out of space in no more than 207 days, that is before the end of the year. Here is how I am working around this problem:
I have created a separate email account on Yahoo! Mail where all incoming emails are forwarded, while leaving a copy on Gmail. Every time my Gmail account will get close to maxing out, I will just delete my older emails from it, having kept a copy on Yahoo! Mail. When the account on Yahoo! Mail will reach its limit, I will just create an other one, using some secret naming convention to help me keep track of multiple accounts while ensuring the availability of appropriate Yahoo! IDs in the future.
Because most of my email searches relate to mails that were recently received or sent, I expect very little disruption from this approach and believe that I will have to use my archives in rare occasions only. Nevertheless, because all incoming emails are forwarded to the archiving account, junk mail that is not automatically filtered out by Gmail will end up there, making my archives less clean than my daily email. Also, because Gmail does not currently support the automatic forwarding of sent emails, I will have to keep all sent emails on my primary Gmail account. I guess it’s just the price to pay until Gmail dramatically increases quotas, most likely through paying subscriptions.
Lastly, the reason why I am creating archiving accounts on Yahoo! Mail instead of Gmail is to support some level of fault tolerance should Gmail ever go down, as was discussed in an earlier post.
And many thanks to Dave for pointing out an error in Gmail’s quota increase rate.
Entry filed under: Office 2.0
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The idea of using other email accounts is interesting but the idea of keeping all incoming mails makes me tick… It makes me think about the theories of getting things done and other organizational practice that say: do not keep things that you are not sure you will need in the future. Maybe you have a different vision on that but I decided to keep only the emails with info that I think I will really need.
I am not going to go over the inbox strategy of getting things done as I know you know it through ;) When I get an email and I am at the last step of the pipeline, If there is nothing important in the email, or if I am not sure I will need the info or if I believe I could get it again, I just delete the email.
I have been using Gmail for more than a year and I am using less than 10% of my account right now. It was up to 30% before I started applying the waste basket strategy. Using this strategy, I believe you could extend the life of your quota for years to come…
Also, I am not sure of how you got the quota increase value from… On my account, it is more like 0.3456 MB a day (0.000004 MB a second)… At that rate, you have around 429 days without increasing your daily quota. With the 11MB a day quota, we are looking at 208 days
As for the spam, it is deleted automatically after 30 days so you are not incurring more than 30 days worth of it at any time… I tried for a while to delete it as it was coming in but I found out it was not worth the time after all since there is no easy way to delete all of it (you have to go through it one page at a time).
This sounds like a viable workaround, but doesn’t it contradict the purpose of Office 2.0 — to “increase my personal productivity”? It surely can’t be as productive to be creating new email accounts when your own hard drive would facilitate storage in one place.
I guess there’s value in showing that the no-local-software approach can work, but until the approach can truly increase productivity, I don’t really see the point.
Randy,
Based on my own experience, creating a new email account on Yahoo! Mail and setting up the forward on Gmail takes no more than five minutes. If you contrast that with the productivity increase you get by being able to access your email from any computer, the trade-off clearly works in favor of the online approach. Not to mention the fact that a hard drive crash or a lost laptop could cost you days of lost productivity.
[…] No need to backup your data yourself. When all your data is managed by reliable third-parties such as Google or Salesforce.com, automatic backup is taken care of. And if you want to remove the dependency on a single service provider, you can always use a combination of them, as described on this post. […]
[…] Data import/export is mandatoryMigrating from one service to an other is possible only if all data can be exported from the first and imported into the second. This is why I never use any service where I cannot get data in and out easily. One problem I faced with this rule was related to Gmail and the fact that one cannot export email archives out of it, but I found a way to work around this limitation by automatically forwarding all incoming emails to a separate email account managed by Yahoo! Mail, as described in this article. Similarly, the .csv export feature offered by LinkedIn does not include unique user IDs, therefore manual synchronization with contacts stored into Salesforce.com is required, and that’s a total waste of time. Hopefully, the good LinkedIn folks will get the hint and add this little field into their .csv export. Patience is the mother of all virtues! […]
[…] Emails stored in GmailAs described in this previous article, all incoming emails are automatically forwarded to a backup Yahoo! Mail account. To do this, you can either use Gmail’s forwarding option or set a custom filter, while creating new accounts on Yahoo! Mail as the older ones get full. […]
Why waste time worrying about a problem that doesn’t exist? For all you know, Google will just suddenly increase the limits on gmail accounts. Furthermore, effective use of the filters could easily resolve your storage and back up issues. The real trouble with gmail is that you can’t be logged into more than one account at once.
[…] Storage quotas are too lowToday, you can find a quarter-terabyte hard drive for $75. That’s 30 cents a gigabyte. With that in mind, the 2.866 GB quota I have with Gmail today seems kinda ridiculous. That’s less than 86 cents! There are ways to work around it, but I would rather not have to worry about it and pay whatever subscription that would give me a terabyte of secure storage online. Rumors have been circulating that Apple might soon offer terabyte .Mac accounts, and Google is the kind of company that thrives on bold challenges like that, so I remain confident that this bug might be fixed before the end of the year. […]
[…] Until recently, the last commodity that was not available for free was storage. Quotas for email accounts have been increasing steadily, nevertheless they remain too limited, as was discussed in this past article. I am now using 42% of my quota on Gmail, and will soon have to move my older emails to a backup account used for archival purposes. […]
[…] Now, what does this mean for Office 2.0 workers? To start, you get more storage capacity. I described ways to work around Gmail’s quota in a past article, but quite frankly, the solutions I came up with are not entirely satisfying. As of today, I reached 89% of my 2820 MB allowance on my free Gmail account, and this is getting quite uncomfortable. If my usage patterns remain the same (5.53 MB of daily emails), a 10 GB account should be enough for about 5 years. And two factors should make it enough for virtually anyone: First, I would expect Google to increase quotas slightly faster than our needs grow, just because they can. Second, Office 2.0 promotes a collaboration model whereby documents are shared rather than sent as email attachments, thereby reducing the volume of emails you need to store. In other words, we are reaching a land of plenty, where storage becomes a commodity that we do not have to worry about anymore. I don’t know about you, but I kinda like that. […]
“First, I would expect Google to increase quotas slightly faster than our needs grow, just because they can”
I was thinking that your needs are unique since you are using Gmail as a storage medium, and therefore your needs are not representative of the general Gmail population base. Perhaps Google will increase your particular storage quota as you near your current allowance by using underutilized storage from other users.
The comparison I make is a Family Plan for cellphones — a family may get a bank of 2,000 minutes per month that is shared across multiple family members. 3 of the 4 may use a combined 500 minutes, while family member number 1 uses 1,500 minutes.
I agree that storage is relatively cheap (and getting cheaper) these days, but one can’t help but consider that Google will hold firm on it’s current quotas to encourage its members to upgrade (pay) to an account that offers more storage. Just because they can increase storage doesn’t mean they will.
Miles,
I think you’re right, and for this reason recently upgraded my account.
Best regards
-Ismael
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed
Leave a Comment