Google doubles Gmail storage capacity to 2 GB per user

“A year after unveiling a free e-mail service with a full gigabyte of storage, Google Inc. (GOOG) is doubling the capacity of each account and plans to keep bumping up the limit in the future,” Matthew Fordahl reports for The Associated Press. “Once the upgrade takes effect Friday [April 1], Gmail users will be able to store up to 2 gigabytes of e-mail and attachments for each account. Even more capacity will be made available after that as it becomes feasible, the company said. ‘Our goal is to make sure storage is no longer an issue for Web mail users,’ said Marissa Mayer, Google’s director of consumer Web products,” Matthew Fordahl reports for The Associated Press.

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Here’s hoping that Apple takes another look at the 250 MB of combined iDisk and .Mac Mail storage they are currently offering. Of course, .Mac offers much more than just email and online storage for the US$99 annual fee. Learn more about all the things you can do with .Mac here. To provide feedback to Apple regarding .Mac, please click here.

33 Comments

  1. .mac just isn’t worth it. There’s a lot to be said for the seamless integration of the iDisk and for the iPhoto publishing, but $99 for the current package is weak.

    It should be a minimum of 500MB for .mac, if not 1GB. I know Apple are a business, and most of us will accept that they should have the right to make a decent profit, but at the current capacities they’re surely going to start to lose subscribers at quite an alarming rate.

  2. Apple should definitely up the .Mac storage to at least a Gigabyte, especially considering that you are paying for it. Here’s hoping this motivates them to do so soon.

    That said, I have to wonder how much of this storage is actually being used by Gmail users. They may be getting a lot of good press and only have to deliver on their promise a very small percentage of the time. This is just email right? The thing is with .Mac that since the space is used for home pages as well as email the chances of it all being used is much greater than gmail.

    By the way, a great little app that takes advantage of .Mac really well is Filechute by yellow mug software. You drop a file or a folder on it (if it is multiple files it archives it automatically), puts it up on your .Mac idisk in a backside area, and give you a link to paste in an email. When the email recipient clicks on the link it automatically downloads the file by ftp to their desktop. Great for sending large files and not clogging up somebody’s email account.

  3. You’re such a goof, Realist. Don’t you realize that while it’s dead wrong for Symantec to charge 70$ for OS X virus “protection”, it’s abolutely right and proper for Apple to claim a similar “service” is worth 50$?

    What is your major malfunction?

    Oops, gotta go. Steve needs to be fellated now…

  4. .Mac should be virtually unlimited. If Google can give its users 2GB for free space and they claimed that they plan to expand that in the future.

    I think .Mac can give out more than 250mb

  5. Ok. I learned to ignore the pop up ad. BUT THIS FREAKING NOISY ASS KILL SHAO KAHN IS THE MOST RUDE PIECE OF CRAP I’VE EVER SEEN ON THE INTERNET AND THAT INCLUDES PORNO.

  6. theloniousMac “I use .mac because of the idisk storage. Believe it or not there are countless people out there who still cannot comprehend FTP.”

    As in you?

  7. I think that Apple should give .mac email addresses away like hotmail or gmail accounts and only charge for the extra features. This would give them a good channel for advertising and newsletters much like you can opt for with other free services.

  8. Apple should offer more space, I agree. But let’s be clear on this, Apple is not competing with Yahoo or Google on this issue. .Mac offers more than just an email account. And think about it, really, how much space do you need for email anyway?

    If Google or Yahoo want to go anywhere with this, why not just offer 2GB of web space to host a website, or just storage? Until they do that they are not even competing with .Mac.

  9. I have gmail and dotmac.

    I use dotmac all the time and have allocated only 25 meg of it to email. Even though all my mail is stored on the server it still has over half left.

    I seriously can not see why the average punter needs 2 gigs of mail space.

    Don’t get me wrong – a gig of dotmac space would be great. More room for webserving and space to use as a backup, but for mail forget it.

  10. I think storage isn’t as much the issue as the bandwidth. You can post videos there and they stream fast. I am able to get my sites hosted for cheeper rates because they don’t eat up a lot of bandwidth. I can store video on my .mac account and have linked into my pages. This bypasses using up my server’s bandwidth and therefore keeps my web hosting price down.

  11. Get your own website!
    .Mac is so not with it – set up to compete with Microsoft and AOL type crap.

    There are lots of bargains out there-
    place I am at: $7.95 a month, 1 Gig storage, 40GB traffic per month, 250 different email addresses…
    And there are places that offer even better deals.

    A friend hosts his for free at:
    http://www.100webspace.com/
    Free hosting package

    100MB disk space
    3GB bandwidth
    3 POP3 e-mails & Webmail
    Free 24/7 technical support
    PHP, Perl/CGI-BIN
    MySQL database
    FTP access
    Web-based file manager
    Small banner

    —————-
    But @ .Mac I have access to free email greeting icards -over 400 to choose from!
    Dang, now that´s important to have!

  12. What you seem to overlook is that the gmail storrage space can only be be filled with mails. I don’t have gmail, but I would assume that the maximum attachment size is about 10mb, right? So to fill it up you’d have to send/receive more than 2000 mails of the size of 10 gb. This of course means it is not well suited for backups and the storage of large files, so most users probably end up using probably about 50mb.
    .mac on the other hand is a real storage solution, meaning that a lot more people actually fill up the space they’re provided with.
    So you really can’t compare the two services.
    But that of course doesn’t change the fact that Apple is a bunch of greedy bastards.

Reader Feedback

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.