Six years of Gmail

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   I have been using Gmail for six years as of today. Six Internet years is like 30 years in the real world! It's an amazing testimony to the quality of that service. And it's all for free.

   But enough congratulations. I noticed something else with Gmail. When I joined in July 2005, the service's main selling point was the huge amount of storage it offered. More than 2GB! And counting as they say on the homepage where they shows a real-time counter of the ever-increasing disk quota allowed to users.

   There has been many speculations on how that quota has been computed over the years. It reached 7GB in Fall 2008. But then at the beginning of 2009 the rate of this growth suddenly dropped by a factor of ten. And we are now, three years later, at 7.6GB. How come? I mean 7.6GB is plenty of space so I am not complaining but with the bandwidth of our Internet connections always increasing and the file of our digital media always growing, for how long will that 7.6GB feel so huge. The maximum attachment size currently is 25MB. My DSLR camera makes bigger files than that!

   So I am wondering if Google is not resting on its laurels here. I am only using about 20% of my Gmail quota so I don't think I would switch to a new service tomorrow even if they offered unlimited disk space. But what if that service also integrated a Dropbox-like feature to backup your files in the cloud. You could share by email big files because they would upload in the background. Wouldn't that be great?

   I guess my conclusion is: stay on your toes Gmail team! Because I really want Gmail to stay the best email service out there. And thanks for everything that you have done so far.

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