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Here’s my opinion on the matter.

The 1000 MB of email storage is strictly marketing. It’s a nice big number that blows away others’ offerings. They could have used any other impressive number. They’re probably going to keep all of your mail, but add an artificial limit to what the user can “see”.

1. Google is already storing most of the web’s content many times over. They are not short on storage.
2. Google would like as much as data as possible for statistical work and other research.
3. There privacy policy states “residual copies of email may remain on our systems for some time, even after you have deleted messages from your mailbox or after the termination of your account”.

So here’s my thinking, you get mail, you delete some mail so it no longer counts against your quota. But since they would like as much data as possible and storage is cheap, they’re going to hang on to it anyways. So does it really matter if they offered 500 MB or 1000 MB, since they’re probably going to keep stuff around anyways? They “Delete Email” button will probably act as a “Hide Email from User” button.

I guess the only part where the quota really comes in is with attachments. It’ll prevent users from storing too many statistically useless attachments (unless they’re going to analyze that too).

What do I think of their privacy policy? Do I care that they may keep my emails forever? No, not really.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 10th, 2004 at 10:34 pm and is filed under Computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.