The Era of 15GB Free Gmail Storage Is Ending (androidauthority.com)
- Reference: 0183226895
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/05/15/1843217/the-era-of-15gb-free-gmail-storage-is-ending
- Source link: https://www.androidauthority.com/google-free-15gb-gmail-storage-ending-explanation-3667360/
> While the company didn't mention which regions are impacted, user reports from yesterday were mostly from African countries. That said, if Google's tests prove successful, this could possibly become the norm for new sign-ups in more regions. The company could be testing ways to discourage users from creating multiple Gmail accounts to access free cloud storage. However, if you already have a Gmail account with 15GB free storage, it shouldn't be impacted by this change.
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> The language on Google's [2]support page mentions "up to 15GB of storage." However, it's a recent change. An [3]archived version of the support page from February did not use the words "up to." Whether the test has been running since early March or Google updated its language before it ever started the test, it's evident that the company could roll out the change globally as well.
[1] https://www.androidauthority.com/google-free-15gb-gmail-storage-ending-explanation-3667360/
[2] https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/9312312?hl=en
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20260204152535/https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/9312312
Who cares? You don't need 5GB of storage! (Score:2, Flamebait)
If you think you need 5GB or more of email storage, you likely have terrible data hygiene. I've seen email accounts with 10, 20, 50+ GB of crusty old emails. In 100% of those cases, the email account owner would figurately jump up and down, swear to god they needed every single email. They would claim that if they got rid of 1 email, their efficiency would be destroyed, and they couldn't work, they couldn't even wake up, no reason to, they were unable to get anything done. In every single case, not 99.9
Re: Who cares? You don't need 5GB of storage! (Score:5, Informative)
Except, bizarrely, the limit isn't just GMail. It's a combined limit across Mail, Drive, Photos, etc. Yes, downloading Google Photos with the default backup to cloud functionality can put you over limit on GMail.
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There's another good example, drive storage, how much storage do you really need, what do you have to keep? My daughters have 30k photos each, some of the photos are good memories, worth keeping, 29.5k of them, are useless. My wife, has 50k photos, 49k of them, useless. That doesn't get into the video problem, but it's the same. People hoard data, emails, photos, videos, text messages, people hoard data, and they don't need to.
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I agree with your first point about hygiene-- and TLDR: That's WORK and doesn't work so well in some cases... That's why people "need" 5GB of mail.
THE 1 %:
I think we agree on the 1% of emails/photos you need. There are emails I've lost to time (pre-Gmail) that I would love to have back.
( Every now and again I do go back to look some friend up or something that I haven't emailed in years -- people do have lifetime events that make it so you want to get together once every 10 years (think reunions, or spec
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I have 3.3GB of email from the last 14 years, and that's from working as an admin, IT manager, cybersecurity professional. 3.3 GB of email, and I have old emails from friends and family that are kept, so I don't lose contact with them. I don't know how many emails I've gotten today, I don't, all of them were deleted once dealt with. None of them contained anything that could accidentally be relevant in any future setting. One of the emails I responded to, then deleted, someone asked me about in Slack, whi
Re: (Score:2)
This is an excellent point. Especially because text is highly redundant and they can chunk things up and replace pieces that exist in another email/file with a placeholder to the same raw data rather than replicate things over and over again. Potentially TB's of email can be stored on GB's of disk this way.
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"You don't need mass email storage, 99.X% of emails are useless, and should be deleted, for 99.99% of people. If you need more than 5GB of email storage, why? Can you come up with a reason that isn't just fear of losing your horde of garbage? Don't use the legal excuse, that a lawyer might ask for an email some day, that's BS and you know it! Don't use the "I might have to reference email X later on", excuse, you'll know if it's important enough to keep."
You are right on the original point but your debunkin
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> You are right on the original point but your debunking of 'excuses' falls flat. First the legal requirement to retain email isn't something you can just ignore because you doubt some lawyer will ask for it. Destroying communications you have a legal requirement to retain for X number of years can land you massive fines or much much worse. Claiming you'll probably get away with it is not a valid reason for breaking the law.
There is no legal requirement to keep old junk emails. If you're doing something that might turn into a contract or legal matter, maybe, but how much of your email is legally relevant to anything? My point was that 100% of your email is not legally relevant, and I would bet less than 1% is. It's probably not 0%, but it's not 100, 50, or even 25%, I would be shocked if anyone except a law firm or judge broke 10%..
> You could get a shiny new 6TB HDD with 5yr warranty for $200 3yrs ago. That's 120 50GB email accounts. If even one of those 120 people accesses one old email during that half decade the drive has almost certainly paid for itself; that's true even if it just saved them a couple hours finding that data elsewhere. Hardware is CHEAP. Storage is CHEAP. Either is effectively infinitely scalable. Time is not only expensive; it also doesn't always scale.
I'll assume a 50 GB email load, if 10 million people have that much email that's 50 x 10 00
Indeed, who cares? (Score:3)
When I was directly admining systems, I didn't have time to argue with people over a couple dollars worth of storage.
I also didn't want people wasting time worrying about quotas or other artificial limits unless they were abusive. (The dude who wrote something that was authing against LDAP 10s of millions of times a day got a talking-to.)
A lot of people confuse "I can't imagine doing or needing X" with "there is a good reason to deny the ability to do X." Honestly, I think most people are Doing It Wron
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It's $10 for one person, but take 1 million people, and it's $10 million, that's the issue, do you need the 1/2 written draft from two years ago? No, no you don't, and I've had people argue to me that it might be useful some day. Granted, with the advent of cloud email, it's not my problem any more, but it's the principal of it. People just hoard data they don't have to keep, and I'm not suggesting having no data, just limit what you do have. I don't have to move a 100 GB dat file around, thank god, but
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I have an archive of all of my email going back to 1992. No plans to get rid of it.
It is organized nicely into separate folders and easily searchable. Total disk space is about 10.5GB, and seeing as I self-host my email, it's taking up 0.19% of my server's disk space. Why would I care about pruning that?
Next step: you pay for it (Score:2)
Clearly the Google LLM investments are not panning out...
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Or they need to repurpose storage from Gmail to Gemini because new hardware is too expensive...
Google Drive and Gmail share space. (Score:4, Insightful)
Time to have duplicate backups of both which all users should do anyway.
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For mail why not just POP to download copies, and automatically remove all email older than a certain time?
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Apple makes it impossible to back up your device to anywhere other than icloud, although I suspect you could then copy the backup to and from your privately-owned storage.
15GB. Pfft! (Score:2)
My primary account has 17GB of free storage.
And thanks to extensive use of a Pixel 4a, I have over 100GB of photos stored in this account.
$10 for 2TB is a no-brainer for me. (Score:2)
I back up all my databases to Gdrive daily.
Plus it gives Google a reason not to kick me off their product which would honestly be catastrophic for me at this point.
Re: (Score:2)
> Plus it gives Google a reason not to kick me off their product which would honestly be catastrophic for me at this point.
One of the reasons I pro-actively [1]de-Googled my life [skoll.ca]. I don't want to be at the mercy of some faceless corporation's AI deciding to fire me as a "customer".
[1] https://dianne.skoll.ca/writings/de-googling-my-life/
5GB doesn't seem like much... (Score:2)
But I just looked at my personal Maildir which has all my emails from back in 1996 and it's only 3.5GB in size. I suspect if you need 15GB you're probably a business (which shouldn't be relying on a free service), or really bad at deleting junk (maybe Google will help you here).
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One word: attachments. A few attached videos puts you over that 15 GB limit. But that just means you need to delete the largest emails frequently.
Why not give them a phone number? (Score:2)
To be honest, a phone number is both the best way of doing 2FA and the best way of detecting which assholes are creating multiple email accounts.
Ditched Gmail (Score:2)
We migrated all of our email and storage to another provider last year. We were tired of being the product and opted for a paid provider that values privacy and includes a good amount of storage for our needs. We have not looked back.
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I self-host. It's not free; I pay about $8/month for a cloud VM that's my MX host and mail filter. The actual IMAP server is a Raspberry Pi in my house. I'm guessing the total hardware cost was about $500 (it has two 6TB USB drives in RAID-1 as the main storage) and it uses about $0.75 worth of electricity per month. I expect the hardware to last at least 5 years, so all in it's about $17/month for as many mailboxes as I like as well as total control and (essentially) unlimited storage.
If it's free, you are the product (Score:2)
Profits have never been higher, and yet their offering continues to get worse. Remember when you could watch your total storage climb in real time? When was the last time you really felt like Google was innovating on their Gmail product? Enshittification continues unabated.
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I remember during the beta when they claimed it was unlimited storage with no need for a delete function and only an archive feature.
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Maybe this is just Google saving people from themselves. If your email inbox is 15GB in size I think you may have a problem (or you're abusing the system, in which case Google is taking measures).
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> Maybe this is just Google saving people from themselves. If your email inbox is 15GB in size I think you may have a problem (or you're abusing the system, in which case Google is taking measures).
The storage is not just used for the inbox, but the archive as well.