For months I have been worrying about reaching the free storage limit of my Gmail account. It was approaching the 70% mark *and counting*! And you know what – the worry was so real that it in effect had made it a practice of mine to keep staring at the bottom-left of the Gmail screen whenever I log in – see image in green box below. (For me, deleting read messages from my inbox is not an option – I keep all messages since day 1.)
And today I have a huge relief! I just noticed that my storage usage has reduced to 49% only, and that the storage limit has increased to 10240 MB (10 GB) from its previous 7.5 GB. And this has in fact just officially happened on April 24, less than two days ago!
My current usage at the time of writing this post (image):
Competition is G!
Oops! Of course I do mean GOOD! With that concept in mind, I believe many non-commercial Gmail users could continue to use the Gmail services without worrying about reaching their free storage limit – As competition in the marketplace (and the cost of storage devices keep going down) is in favour of the consumers that the storage limit may increase again in due time.
Here is what Wiki has to say about the competition among those big players in the industry:
After Gmail’s initial development and launch, many existing web mail services quickly increased their storage capacity.
For example, Hotmail increased space for some users from 2 MB to 25 MB, with 250 MB after 30 days, and 2 GB for Hotmail Plus accounts. Yahoo! Mail went from 4 MB to 100 MB and 2 GB for Yahoo! Mail Plus accounts. Yahoo! Mail storage then increased to 250 MB and in late April 2005 to 1 GB. Yahoo! Mail announced that it would be providing “unlimited” storage to all its users in March 2007 and began providing it in May 2007.
These were all seen as moves to stop existing users from switching to Gmail and to capitalize on the newly rekindled public interest in web mail services. The desire to catch up was especially noted in the case of MSN’s Hotmail, which upgraded its email storage from 250 MB to the new Windows Live Hotmail which includes 5 GB of storage that grows with you (expands if necessary). In November 2006, MSN Hotmail upgraded all free accounts to 1 GB of storage.
In June 2005, AOL started providing all AIM screen names with their own email accounts with 2 GB of storage.
Google may terminate a Gmail account after nine months of inactivity. Other webmail services have different, often shorter, times for marking an account as inactive. Yahoo! Mail deactivates dormant accounts after four months.
As well as increasing storage limits following the launch of Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail also enhanced their email interfaces. During 2005 Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail matched Gmail’s attachment size of 10 MB. Following the footsteps of Gmail, Yahoo! launched the Yahoo! Mail Beta service and Microsoft launched Windows Live Hotmail, both incorporating Ajax interfaces. Google increased the maximum attachment size to 20 MB in May 2007 and to 25 MB in June 2009.
So be worry free and enjoy gmailing for life!
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