Google clamps down on free storage
bloombergquint.com
bloombergquint.com
> “I am unreasonably sad about using almost all of my free google storage. Felt infinite. Please don’t make me pay! I need U gmail googledocs!,” one person tweeted in September.
Will journalists PLEASE stop taking tweets from any rando out there and publishing them as "news". Yes, with hundreds of million of users you can basically find any quote you want to back up your pet theory.
I feel like I should just open a bunch of twitter accounts and post things like "Journalist X is a complete idiot" and then write an article about how the whole world thinks Journalist X is incompetent, with low and behold all these tweets to back it up!
Um, no? How could I _possibly_ have anything intelligent to say about this?
And then it hit me... this is why local news is so crazy. Because the people who end up interviewed on TV are the types of people who _don't_ realize they have nothing intelligent to say, or who are self-absorbed enough to want to get on TV however they can.
Needless to say, I didn't do the interview.
Juxtapose this with the local news interviews and it all makes a strange sort of sense....
Interesting r/mildlyinfuriating thread[2] about it.
[1] https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/66739/amazon-que...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/4200oz/w...
"They climbin' in yo windows" "Whistle tips go woo woo" "Ain't nobody got time for that" "they had us the first half, I'm not gonna lie" Kai the Hatchet-Wielding Hitchhiker etc
The only difference with Twitter and Facebook is that they can now do it automatically and at impressive scale.
not sure if gp's point has anything to do with twitter itself or character limits.
I agree that twitter is a cesspool and does not encourage thoughtful communication, but it feels a little forced to me in this conversation.
All these random joe quotes are stupid and I wish editors would stop it.
You can argue that Trump's tweets got more attention than they were worth before he was president.
This morning I made breakfast and left for work without eating it.
Even I came to the realization that if you don't pay for something you are a disposable, interchangeable asset to be exploited.
$4.25 per month gets me 25GB at Fastmail.
$1.08 per month gets me a domain name at Namecheap.
$5.33 per month gets me an email address with no ads and no tracking, support when things go wrong, and an email address that is my actual name at a .com address that sounds respectable.
If fastmail goes bad? All of my emails are on my computer. I just switch providers and I can keep the same address.
If namecheap goes bad? I move my domain name to another service.
There are step-by-step easy-to-follow tutorials on how to do what I did that are so simple to implement that even someone who left their bowl of oatmeal on the kitchen counter this morning and is really hungry at work could follow them.
If something isn't worth spending $5.33 per month on, is it really that important?
I don't pay for HN. If they started screwing with their users, or started charging for the service I would move on and certainly wouldn't write articles claiming that YC hooked me then hung me out to dry for cash.
I trust Google that if I have 2fa enabled and alerts for suspicious activity going out, they'll protect the infrastructure.
https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824?hl=en
You may also want to consider only using your G Suite account for G Suite features. Certain features designed for personal Google accounts don't work properly for G Suite accounts (like Youtube/Google Play Music family plans).
They punish their paying customers.
Not exactly. Namecheap has notoriously flagged people's accounts for no reason as suspicious. Mine was flagged for simply for updating my password with one that I generated from a password-generator. They wouldn't respond, and when they did they said that my account was flagged do to suspicious activity that they felt was legitimate. It took me over a week to finally unlock my account, but that wasn't until I had to take the issue to social media with screen shots.
The answer he gave you was correct. The interpretation wasn't
I imagine it would be easier to socially engineer a cellphone store employee and get a SIM to do a SMS-based password reset for a Google/Microsoft/Apple email account than it would be to hijack my domain.
It sure is interesting sitting back watching your average consumers purchase chromebooks and nexus phones only to have their subsidies be pulled.
Chrome books with the baked in eol, and cloud storage cut in half was a pretty evil moment. Curious to see what the future has for the customers who have become the product.
- Google provides really good tools for archiving your data. If you want to reduce your storage footprint, you can use Google Takeout to grab it, archive it somewhere else, and then clean up items you no longer want. I recently did this with my photos, I knew I had some huge videos that had been uploaded that I didn't need (I had edited them into a Youtube video), so I was able to find and delete them and open up quite a bit of space. I toyed with the idea of deleting photos 5 years old, once I archived them, but I didn't need to because of the above.
- Google provides a lot of value to me for the $3/month I've been spending. Photo enrichment and searching is something I use all the time. Storage of my documents and files is very useful and google has been super reliable.
https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/112096115
https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/113672044
Google doesn't want you to be able to sync/backup your own photos anymore.
I tried out one drive before going to Dropbox and had huge issues withy the client on my Mac, my windows box, and just in general. The selective sync support was atrocious and kept getting into conflicts with the directories on the drive and refusing to sync then duplicating folders.
I also checked out iCloud Drive, but there’s no selective sync option and there’s some large directories I keep in cloud storage that I don’t need on my laptop.
This is what I'm doing to migrate my data over to Microsoft's offering (I get adfree mail and 1TB + office products that work offline). I'm just waiting for Microsoft to let me use a domain without GoDaddy, so I can use the email, but I'm more likely to use it for storage.
Also, how are people hitting 15GB on just email? A little digital "KonMari" might be in order.
It is a bummer though, that their tiers go from Free (10GB), 100GB, 200GB, then up to 2TB. That's a huge jump!
Why not have a 500GB, and a 1TB tier?
They could probably get more people to pay them for storage if they offered a 50GB tier at $0.99 like Apple does for iCloud.
The 10GB free tier up to 100GB is a large jump too, and $1.99 a month might be just a little over the threshold for those that don't really use that much data but want phone backups and some pictures, etc.
The 200GB/$3/mo to 2TB/$10/mo jump doesn't seem so bad to me. That's a dramatically lower per GB price ($0.015 -> $0.005). But then above 2TB it goes back up ($0.01), but worse is if you use 3TB, it's still $100/mo (that's over 3 cents a GB!)
I use backblaze for most of my bulk data storage (0.005/GB/mo).
My heartburn is Gmail was rolled out as near infinite storage. They told you archive, not delete. And for a while they had a ticker at the bottom showing your storage increasing over time. The cost is modest, but I feel Google isn't being true to the spirit of Gmail when they limit and charge for email storage.
Throwing my voice in I now pay. It is worth the price to keep high resolution photos of my kids with effortless sync from my wife's phone.
While I do not feel that restricting Gmail and their other data collection tools to paying customers is in Google's long term plan, the potential of random price bumps on a highly integrated, wide ranging and very much closed product experience like the Gsuite certainly creates a problematic power dynamic.
I'm all for paying for a service, but it does seem rather underhanded to claim someone is using X GB of storage, but making it near impossible for them to see what is actually using that storage.
Is that what you were looking for?
[1] https://drive.google.com/settings/storage?hl=en&utm_source=g...
There's no way to show the largest photo/video, no way to tell which photo is covered by which storage promise, and no way to help manage that space.
So basically it's a trap.
I likely have some hour or two video that's a big chunk of my storage, but you can't sort by size or video length.
The weirdest of which is that pixel 4 prices are higher than expected (even higher than Apple!) and they are dropping the free backup full quality photo backups.
You also can't find out how much storage a folder on google drive is taking up. And don't even get me started on Photos.
Also this may be helpful: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/quota
So basically you have a single google storage pool that's reported at the bottom of the gmail.com interface. But now you can't use any of the google drive related tools to see what is consuming all your storage.
The photos.google.com is time based, so it's very hard to see what your largest files are.
How much space does this folder take? What is the largest video? How much space do old photos take? All trivial to answer on a local disk, impossible to do in Google's account.
I recently found it easier to find an old music video I’d made by using takeout to download my YouTube archive, rather than figuring out which sub identity of which linked account I had used to upload the private video.
I mean nothing good or bad about that. But why would you expect to be able to download data that's not yours?
I don't know what to take away from this other than the reminder that every public company has a duty to shareholders to take people's money! That's the function of a company: profit. What do we really expect here?
I highly doubt that would ever happen though, considering data is the new oil.
Oh well, one can dream.
The main difference between consumer Google accounts and G Suites accounts is that G Suite accounts come with an extremely comprehensive (complex, complicated) administration panel which is absolutely overkill for use cases other than managing G Suite users within a company / organization.
But, you can sign up for G Suite as an individual, and most of the default settings will just work out of the box without much customization needed.
You will have issues if you want to use things like Google Home or Google Nest (or any other consumer-only services... Nest thermostats, for example, won't connect to G Suite accounts and only connect to regular Google consumer accounts).
Here's Google's guarantee re: legally not collecting / selling your G Suite data...
> There is no advertising in the G Suite Core Services, and we have no plans to change this in the future. Google does not collect, scan or use data in G Suite Core Services for advertising purposes. [1]
[1] https://gsuite.google.com/learn-more/security/security-white...
So much is broken, and backing out is a bigger nightmare.
Here's me failing to get a G Suite to act like a Google Account, and then figuring out just what I can migrate back to Gmail: https://medium.com/@buro9/one-account-all-of-google-4d292906...
Somehow though, I have managed to get 2TB of photo storage for free. The photos are there in full quality, but do not count to storage usage.
If you're brave, there's a path here to unlimited free photo storage.
I would not advise anyone to use G Suite for a personal email address.
To me that reads a lot like 'Google does indeed collect, scan, use, read, algorithmically process, mine, analyze, characterize, handle, refine, derive from, and peruse data in G Suite Core Services, but with the primary purpose of doing other stuff with it than direct advertising.'
Sorry, if that's actually not fair this time, but with all the doublespeak about these things for the last decade and a half or so, hedging like that does not inspire confidence.
That qualifier leaves a lot open. Without client-side encryption it's just words.
My only concern is what exactly is the extent of "G Suite Core Services", does that apply to all existing features of Google, the entire entity itself including YouTube/etc, or just the services provided by the G Suite.
I still may do this but if it doesn't include search, YT, etc, it will be a bit disappointing knowing they are double dipping with my subscription and data.
You got it right there. All other purposed are fair game.
If storage isn't a concern (just privacy), $6/mo for 30 GB (double what Gmail gives you for free).
As a side-note, Drive File Stream messes up uploading big files/folders due to this: https://support.google.com/nonprofits/thread/13880126?hl=en
I don't think that's a strong enough requirement. Google doesn't sell your information (it's too valuable for them to do that). Instead, they use it to profile you for better targeting. So them not selling your information doesn't mean much. The same goes for not "collecting". Even if they don't fingeprint or location track you, they still have access to all your emails which is still a treasure trove of information. You can't tell them not to collect it because they need to to operate a mail service.
The only acceptable solution in my mind is end to end encryption.
Silly doesn’t begin to describe it.
Microsoft does the exact same thing with O365. Even knowing people at Microsoft and getting tickets internally escalated and re-escalated, it took me far too long to get things unlocked, and I never got an answer on what caused it. A week later, I was locked out again. Same routine. Finally got back in, and a bunch of music that I had legally purchased from 7digital and stored in OneDrive was mysteriously missing. During the whole process, as soon as anyone you talk to sees the state of your account, they'll refuse to continue talking. You have to fill out a generic form, and you don't receive a response. Either your account gets unlocked an indefinite amount of time later, or it doesn't.
All the major cloud providers seem to operate that way.
1. It is great that Google is working to come up income sources other than ads. This will help diversify their business and motives over time.
2. This may cause some to think that the money is the only method of payment for the service that's happening. That payment via our data isn't happening because money is involved. I hope this does not happen.
3. It opens the door for competitors who want to charge for a service. If Google can charge this gives some emotional motivation for others to do it instead of harvesting and selling data. It's a tiny thing and a bit part but still a thing.
4. This is telling that Google isn't making enough money on this data to justify storing more of it. What does this say about enough for them? How much data do people want to store and what would it mean?
I'll stop at 4 things. I hope people wonder down these different paths that are not mutually exclusive.
1: People who were very active in the BBS/Usenet days and saw the emergence of the public Internet and web.
2: People (like me) who mainly got on when the .com bubble was warming up. People in 1 and 2 saw or even had these complaints, and had plenty of skepticism about ad driven models when they emerged with the growing realization at Google and other surviving web companies that ads and data mining could save them after the crash.
3: People who only know the internet after that. Who never knew a time when the internet was such a big, new thing that people still capitalized the word.
I think most of the people who complain about companies charging for stuff are in 3 and never knew what we lost when ad-funded silos pushed everything else out. It doesn't help that a lot of them are, along with 2 and even 1, struggling to make enough money to survive with so many jobs turned into SaaS or taken over by big outsourcing firms that don't need as many people.
https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/ensuring-...
Disclosure: I work for google on G Suite, but not on Gmail.
This says nothing about email metadata being used in relation to ads or for uses of content unrelated to ads (e.g., generation of search results).
If I hadn't seen the leaked selfish ledger video [1] I would not look for these nuances in the language.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/17/17344250/google-x-selfish...
Is spam filtering mining? Is indexing for search (in Gmail) mining? Is sticking flights on your calendar (and nothing else) mining?
Mining sounds nefarious. Are analysis of emails for the consumer still mining? If they are, and any scanning of emails is bad, why use Gmail? To me at least, it's value is the stuff it does for me.
There's nothing in their privacy policy that explicitly states they don't use that info for ad targeting that I can see.
But that's Gsuite, what about consumer Gmail?
"G Suite’s Gmail is already not used as input for ads personalization, and Google has decided to follow suit later this year in our free consumer Gmail service. Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change"[1]
[0]: https://support.google.com/googlecloud/answer/6056650, under "Does Google use my organization’s data in G Suite services or Cloud Platform for advertising purposes?"
[1]: https://www.blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-tractio....
I could read that as for only paid Gsuite Gmail, not free Gmail.
As an aside the "what part of..." leader in your reply comes across as rude. The resources you are citing aren't an easy find from within free Gmail. And they aren't in the privacy policy, so what I said remains true.
"Google does not use keywords or messages in your inbox to show you ads. Nobody reads your email in order to show you ads."
Google's privacy policies are written to be understandable by lay-people. Describing the specific breakdowns of what things they aren't doing can be intimidating or scary. So they don't. But the information you care about is still there, unless you're assuming some weird level of linguistic runaround.
Also if Google doesn't need my emails, can you tell me why Google is behind other companies in end-to-end encryption of emails? I'm sure many people would like to have it as a feature (even if it makes searching these emails server side impossible)
I assume this, specifically, is what you're referring to https://schema.org/EmailMessage
[1] https://schema.org/FlightReservation
For example, I remember running across a purchase history page a while back that had saved purchase history data based on email confirmations in gmail. IIRC, it was from specific sellers like Amazon going further back than my gmail history, which I periodically purge. I never wanted/enabled this 'feature' and saw no way to disable or delete the purchase history. Maybe this stopped, maybe it didn't, but this game of whack-a-mole with Google has gotten tedious.
How else does your employer arrive at this aggregated/filtered dataset? Oneiromancy?
[0] https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/google-tracks-your-p...
https://www.cnet.com/news/google-is-tracking-your-purchases-...
I’ve done this before with Nextcloud and a QNAP NAS and it couldn’t be easier. I highly recommend taking the governance of your data seriously. If you don’t you may end up losing everything without knowing it.
You can do a Google Takeout but that's huge and therefore painful to do frequently.
Synology has various plug-in's/apps that with either synchronize with cloud storage options (i.e. DropBox, OneDrive, etc.) - or backup to cloud storage.
(No, I am not shilling, just been a happy customer of theirs for about 7-years, store about 20tb on my local 5-bay NAS)
It's never "just".
In the case of email, you've not only got to back it up into a usable form but remove the old ones from gmail in order to get the free space back. And then it's no longer in your gmail interface.
If you like running the local mail server for fun that’s cool but it’s pretty easy to secure your data from loss while still using google services.
Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage is about the same price as iCloud, but also charges for downloads.
Since Backblaze is profitable (as far as I know?), presumably Apple are making money off iCloud storage, but I'm still not sure if I'd use the word "lucrative" here.
...assuming you use exactly that much. If you use something like 250GB, it's twice the price as s3. If you check the offerings[1], there's a gap in the 200GB-2TB range. I suspect that's to force "average users" (in the 200GB-1TB range) into paying more than they need, while giving the appearance of being competitive (if you use all 2TB, which most won't).
[1]
50GB: $0.99
200GB: $2.99
2TB: $9.99In old days, when hit by dreaded mailbox size exceeded notification, in Outlook I always used to sort mails by size and remove the attachments - which used to be the only culprit in mailbox bloat.
Go through top 10-20 mails, and you are set for another year or so before you hit the mailbox limit again. Rinse and repeat.
But, do you know about their search options? You can use "size:5MB" for example to find emails over 5MB. This is what I do when I find I need to, as you say, trim the bloat.
More info on the feature can be found here: https://www.labnol.org/internet/gmail-size-search/26669/
Alternatively, you can just archive off X years off mail and store it off of gmail. That way if you ever need it you can always dig it up.
(I say "think" because while I use a gmail account in my email client, I only use it to receive notifications from Google, so no wild folder/tags setup, and I never check the webmail to see if it matches the emails I see in Thunderbird)
As of that time, my mailbox was using 17GB (14GB of which are in one long-running thread), and 900MB of that was email reply quotes. Google refuses to provide an option to disable email quotes, which are completely useless in an email thread of all gmail accounts.
I want my 900MB of free storage back, dammit!
Also, there's no way (AFAIK) to delete images attached to emails, while keeping the messages.
Also, $20/yr for 100GB seems like a steal. I use G Suite even for my personal email but even on my longest-standing account with almost a decade of history I am only using 20GBs with the majority of that being photos.
The problem here is not the question if Gmail is good or not.
The problem is that they subsidized their Gmail and other services in order to get rid of small competitors and once they have a large market share, they will make most of their services paid. It will take time, it will be slow but it's going to happen.
And they use their large market share to keep all of the small independent mail providers and self-hosted email servers in check by marking their emails as spam.
Drive now exists and takes up more of that space, but I'm still comfortably away from my limits.
I'm not upset about eventually having to pay for storage, but I was and am upset about their claim that it would never be necessary.
It's perfectly reasonable to charge for these services and what they are suggesting to charge -- if I were still a Google customer. But that's not how it was sold to everyone. How many competitors did they drive out by taking this approach and undercutting this way for so long?
I've had large corporate email environments in my portfolio for about half of my career. As recently as 2017, ~2-3% of a 200k org of those users would exceed the free GMail tier in terms of storage. I don't have the stats in front of me, but I'd put money on 80% of the userbase being less than 10GB.
Big email users are always using email as a filing system. Calling GMail bait-and-switch based on marketing claims made in a 2005 context is a pretty extreme stance. My team at a big enteprise org provided folks with 50-100MB (similar to pre-GMail online offerings) in 2005.
Then Google offered a seemingly limitless service that is to this day practically unlimited for all but the most active user.
About the initial 1GB limit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail#Internal_deve...
Sure enough, I'm way beyond my 1GB initial limit now. I just tried to clean things up yesterday (deleting large items from Gmail and Drive), and even once I exclude the stuff from Drive, it seems like I'm over 10GB of my 15GB.
So for now, it's still true... But it seems less and less likely that it will remain true. Certainly I'm already worrying about it.
That said, I find the interface so much better than the competition that I would pay the $2/mo for 100gb to keep it working. Or find a way to delete a lot of emails that should have been deleted long ago, but I followed their "archive everything" pattern with.
I have a domain at namecheap, which forwards my address (say foo@bar.com) to my gmail account. I use fetchmail from my home computer to bring the gmail content to my local mail server (dovecot), which serves it out to me via imaps.
That means there is usually very little sitting in gmail, and it can accumulate there for a while when I have to do maintenance on my home OpenBSD server (which is quite rare and doesn't last very long generally).
That means I can keep my email address "forever" (it'll always stay foo@bar.com) but I can switch out of gmail anytime I want, as long as the provider I switch to allows POP.
It also means I can take advantage of the spam filtering provided by gmail. I also take advantage of the "advanced parsing" they perform on my mail, but my default assumption is that anybody in the chain will be doing it anyways, so I have no illusions that switching out of gmail will help prevent any data mining.
Now my Gmail is overflowing because it's too difficult to archive thing I want, or delete what I don't in bulk. I actually have to log into the web interface to do any kind of clean up, which is something I never had to do with Inbox.
When you are approaching your limit they give you a warning and link to this: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6374270?hl=en
It's also harder if you've been in the Apple ecosystem for a while with getting off with the free tier of storage.
I suspect a lot of us are going to end up paying various subscription fees for storage on a number of services we use.
Then a few hours later I receive the download link and download them. Then search for the label and delete them all to release the space.
Don't use the existing archive functionality, because you won't be able to delete them all ; by doing a "in:archive" search the div which propose to really select them all won't pop-up (feature or dark-pattern I don't know).
It seemed interesting and novel when Gmail first launched and they encouraged archiving everything, but all these years later, mail clients are still engineered around this notion, even when they're not Gmail-only mail clients.
I like to delete emails, and for me, on iOS, that means I tend to use either Outlook or Spark (between iPhone and iPad), or.. ironically, Gmail for iOS, which allows for a one-swipe-action committed delete.
If consumers feel that it is normal to pay small amounts of money for useful web-based services, Google and other sites will have better and more transparent opportunities to monetize.
E: that seems to only apply when using private mode, for whatever reason.
The end times are truly near; the machine will ouroborosesquely eat itself soon. :-)
I tried to just make a new one and migrate, but there is not a reasonable way I have found to migrate 10 gigabyte email accounts. With their rate limiting, I end up with napkin math suggesting about 30 days to migrate, using someone else's github scripts that do lots of error checking and restarting.
Aren't you able to upgrade directly to G Suite Basic? (I myself have both domains on legacy free Google Apps, and newer ones on paid G Suite.)
The only "cloud" I tolerate is buying stuff from the watching movies on Netflix and shopping on Amazon and likes.
Of course when consulting and client demands it I work with the Azure/Github/etc but that is the extent of my involvement. Anything that happens on that front becomes a client problem. Not mine.
There are a lot of reasons to be mad at google, having to pay for storage is not one of them.
Bad idea. It's a shared pool of storage resources, which was quickly filled up by photos. Leaving Gmail with no storage. I suddenly was not getting any emails to that account, with no notifications.
Seemed VERY vindictive to suddenly not deliver 75KB emails because I had stored some photos.
On my computer, the sync'd Google Drive files come to less than one GB, so it's not that.
This argument "but we don't spy on USA citizens so now we're all good and ethical" doesn't make much sense to me. If a Dutch company allegedly spies on foreign customers, it really wouldn't change my (Dutch) opinion about my privacy at that company.
This could be email 2.0... First rule: 1)Do not require host name in the field name. johndoe@gmail.com becomes johndoe.
Who runs the domain?
The beauty of email as protocol is that its independent. Nothing is stopping you from running you @cocoa19.com (given its non-occupied already).
If I don't want Google to run my email, I just switch providers, let's say protonmail or fastmail, etc. But I don't have to give a new address to all my acquaintances.
Also the prefix in the phone number is exactly like a domain.
Even if there were no prefixes, one way or another you need a governing body that ensures no clashes occur and has power to decide on disputes. So no two companies try to assign same number to two different customers.
No, that happened when they started selling ads.