Dear Google, I Have More Than 10,000 Contacts | Hacker News Reader

Dear Google, I Have More Than 10,000 Contacts

feld.com

155 pointsadmp140 comments

This is the type of support response which is accepted by companies as "good enough," because it recognizes that there is a problem and offers a "solution."

Really, this is one of those non-apology apologies that is infuriating to people with completely reasonable expectations. What is this nonsense of asking the user to formally request a feature? They just did request a feature! If it needs to go into a system, the support person should do that for them.

A better approach: actually apologize, give your explanation (or excuse), give a timeline for a solution if possible.

Abbreviated example for this situation: "Very sorry, we understand why this has caused confusion and problems… We set arbitrary limits to prevent outright abuse, and made a mistake by not having a function to override in special cases such as yours… I've forwarded your issue to our engineering dept., and I will personally inform you when we've solved your problem." Is that really so hard?

I would suspect the real reason is something along the lines of "We download the entire contact list in JS in the client to do autocompletion, so if it gets too big your browser runs out of memory and crashes." They might also be storing the contacts database as a single row in their backend store. Either way it's not necessarily as easy as a quick change in an upper limit, and the number of users affected is likely to be quite small, so I wouldn't be surprised if this wasn't exactly at the top of their priorities.

$10 says that the support guy has no idea why it's not easy (or whether it's easy), which is why he gave a completely generic non-answer. And even if it isn't a top priority, the support guy should definitely put it into the system as a feature request, ideally with a link to the issue so the customer knows it was entered. This might as well have been an automated email:

Dear <customer>,

Unfortunately, we don't allow <feature requested>. If you'd like to see us do <feature requested> in the future, please follow these instructions to request it...

I'd presume you're right about the support guy not having all the knowledge required for my hypothetical answer, but if it's not a live communication (i.e. chat or phone), why not spend the time calling up someone who would know?

Because support people deal with spurious and unimportant issues like this all the time. They need to deal with them quickly so they can help people who have real problems.

Imagine the number of people who try to test the limits of Google's software. I'm sure they get thousands of issues every day with people who have intentionally tried to hit the limits on size of inbox, number of emails, length of search term, etc.

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Actually, no. This is exactly Google politely telling him that the particular request is a low priority. Unless you FR meshes with an existing roadmap item OR it is causing a significantly large business impact for an Apps Premier customer OR it is novel & potentially profitable and they humor you, it's not going to happen. Scalability is important at the scale of 200 million users, and going after the edge cases doesn't make good business sense.

That said, they do take FRs seriously, and they are incredibly (astonishingly) open about their roadmaps... depending who you are.

That's all reasonable. What's unreasonable is their very unsatisfactory response. You're probably completely right that it's not an easy change.

I am curious what one does with 10,000 contacts, though…

Equally though - it's far from an unforeseeable problem, this individual is unlikely to be the first affected and they've had the data to see this coming for some time, and it wouldn't be impossible to fall over to a separate, more scalable system, for the larger user databases such as this.

Bad idea, bad response.

i agree that this is most likely a technical limitation dealing with auto-complete. i said as much in the comments in the article as well.

Are you serious? You want Nordstorm service for fleamarket prices? Oh, I forgot, the Internet is gonna change everything.

1971: Dear user, You cannot have more than 10,000 records. If we increased the maximum in the data base schema, we'd have to modify half of our software. Sorry, IT.

1981: Dear user, You cannot have more than 10,000 records. Our software vendor set this limit and we don't have the source code. Sorry, IT.

1991: Dear user, You cannot have more than 10,000 records. We don't have enough room in our budget for more hard disk. Sorry, IT.

2001: Dear user, You cannot have more than 10,000 records. Our network traffic is so high that we had to set arbitrary limits. Sorry, IT.

2011: Dear user, You cannot have more than 10,000 records. The internet is full. Sorry, Google.

[EDIT: Replaced "contacts" with "records" 5 times. The general case causes less confusion. Thank you, juiceandjuice.]

Before 1991, it would have probably been "A Rolodex can only hold 10,000 cards" for most people. The solution would be to buy another Rolodex.

True, but hackers are smart people and don't like dumb rules.

In real physical rolodex you can understand the limit, because it really exists. In Gmail it's hardcoded "OK <= 10000" and that's hard to understand, specially when there's upgrade for 20,000 contacts - so 10,000 is just an artificial dumb rule.

I fear that 1981 still applies today, and is indeed the case with Google.

I bet Google actually has access to its own code for Apps contacts.

Having access to the code, and having the willingness to modify it, are different things.

And yet both are different from "we don't have the source code", now aren't they?

You don't need the source! Just find where 10,000 limit is in the binary and change it to some other larger number. Assuming it's a normal 4-byte signed integer, it can go a lot higher..

Aaah, but it's in "the cloud," and the user of the software can't change even the binaries.

This is where the 37 signals folks would politely say no. You can't please every user, and something tells me that a majority of gmail users aren't sporting a 10k contact list.

The 37 signals philosophy is to increase satisfaction through simplicity. Removing rarely used features can increase software simplicity which results in higher satisfaction for the majority of users.

In this case, allowing 20,000+ contacts does not reduce anything for the rest of their user base; it only positively impact some heavy (and presumably loyal) users of their system, which nets in total increased satisfaction.

If the goal is to maximize overall total satisfaction, Google should engineer their system to support maximally conceivable number of contacts.

> In this case, allowing 20,000+ contacts does not reduce anything for the rest of their user base; it only positively impact some heavy (and presumably loyal) users of their system, which nets in total increased satisfaction.

This is oversimplification. Knowing google, they would want to track different users' contacts and mutual contacts, and email frequencies habits etc. Contact size, is larger than O(N) complexity.

> Contact size, is larger than O(N) complexity.

Yes, but the graph is very very sparse.

nor does it need to happen in real time in the browser :)

Agreed, but capacity planning is done on worst case.

The majority of Gmail users aren't paying users either, nor are they paying for a business account. For the free / non-business accounts, yes, by all means, put in an arbitrary limit. But that's actually pretty low for a business - what if they have > 10k employees, much less external contacts?

As far as I know, for business using google apps, if you have 10k employees you don't need to have 10k contacts, I think there is some kind of ldap integration.

Edit: See http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ... I don't think user profiles (that would be what is used for employees inside an organization) and shared contacts have a 10k limitation, only the user personal contacts have it.

Domain contacts (fed by a GAL sync in addition to domain-level groups created via cpanel) are not counted toward the limit.

Any company with that many employees is not going to be using Gmail in the first place.

Many schools use gmail and have well over 10k students. Northeastern for example uses gmail and has over 15000 undergrads.

I wish my school would use Gmail. Then we might be able to actually do things with our email :\

I agree. My school (UMass Boston) went with Windows Live for students. Usually, I would commend outsourcing this sort of thing (especially at the crossroads of government and academia), but now I can get a list of every student's email by just clicking address book. It's a joke. Staff/faculty email is managed locally with Exchange 2003.

Why do you say that? We have about 2-3k and use Google Apps and it's a great fit. Just curious what you think would make it not a good fit if/when we start to approach 10k?

You mean like Google?

you clearly live under a rock.

And you clearly need lessons in civility. It just never occurred to me that a company of > 10K employees would use it. I had never really thought that out.

civility, the new HN buzzword

so maybe you should have kept your uninformed comment to yourself? http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/customers/index.html

Someone not doing their homework doesn't give you a license to be a jerk.

um, this is the internet..yes it does. additionally, you were clearly digging at gmail/google as an enterprise email solution...so that's ok, but digging at you for digging at them isn't? since when is being a hypocrite civil? also, does your mommy still tuck you in at night?

I've only made one comment in this thread, and it didn't contain any of those things.

my bad dude, i thought you were the guy who made the original comment.

For someone who founded a website relating to google apps, this would have been a great opportunity to explain using your experience.

Instead you decide to be a jerk.

if you read the article, i did explain the probable reason for this limitation, under my real name in the comments. i choose when i want to share what information where, and i stand by my statements in this thread. some jerk tried to belittle google apps as an enterprise solution, only to cry when i called him out, saying he lives under a rock. not a big deal..except to all the pansies on hacker news, apparently. i'm not here for yours or anyone's approval..i just read the news..and apparently, i am a troll. go figure. if you want my assistance on google apps, you can find me on the help forums, answering google apps administrators' questions about google apps, in my free time.

HN seems like a place to make a good impression given what your company offers.

why is that? my business model doesn't include a strategy to win over HN readers with my comments. secondly, i'm not interested in joining y combinator, nor am i here to network. i read the news here and occasionally comment on something related to google apps, but not nearly to the extent that i do so other places, where my input has far greater value. i have already stated that i do not come here seeking approval. commenting on a link to an article on a website that aggregates links to other websites is not really a great use of my time (i happen to be on the tail end of a business trip sitting in my hotel room after a long week of work, so i have some downtime and this little conversation has provided me with a little entertainment this evening). the person whom i said clearly lives under a rock made a stupid and baseless comment meant to dig at google apps, as i stated above. this isn't exactly in the spirit of HN, yet when i call him out on his obvious bias, i get scolded for being a "jerk". sorry if this seems off to me, i am clearly in the minority here. i understand that now. in any case, i still stand by every single word i have written in this thread. and furthermore, the guy who did make the original comment is a liar. google uses google apps,...anyone who knows anything about google knows that (if you know of the existence of HN, you also know about google). last time i checked, google had over 20k employees, again, a common fact amongst the tech community. so i was being polite when i said he lived under a rock (insinuating he was uninformed), rather than calling him a troll or a liar.

Actually, this is where the Google people did politely say no.

Maybe. I could also imagine 37signals writing a blog post like "We had these wacky users with more than 10k contacts, and we thought about it for a second, and we realized that if we fix the bottleneck by refactoring our code, it will also reduce the load on our contacts server by 40% (including us), which is a win for everyone, so we went ahead and did it."

Do you actually contact 10,000 people in a way that's not spam? The answer is obviously No. Nobody talks to 10,000 people.

What are you gonna do, spend five weeks calling the first 4,000 people? Send 2,500 text messages? CC 8,000 users on your annual Christmas Greeting e-mail? How the hell would you even begin to sort through that many contacts using a cell phone or a standard e-mail client?

It's Google. This company serves the general public and doesn't have the resources to tailor its service to every asshole (or Executive) with unrealistic expectations. Next time somebody asks for more than 10,000 contacts they should just flip him the bird.

Congressional respresentatives can easily have more than 10,000 'contacts.' It would be interesting to see if Microsoft's Exchange server can handle more than 10,000. Active Directory certainly can. So perhaps it would be a competitive feature.

For this community however I would agree there is always a tension between the 80 - 90% solution and the outliers. If you have more business than you can handle, supporting outliers seems like a waste of resources, the problem comes when someone decides to support those outliers and builds a system that can handle your customer base as well. That gives them the high ground competitively.

From Google's perspective I suspect its not like they get enough revenue from this whole Apps business to make it worth their while, it seems to be more of a way to poke MS than a product. (But disclaimer time I use Google's app)

In Exchange, you can have multiple folders that contain contacts. I asked our Exchange guys, who said that over about 5,000 you may run into issues. YMMV.

I haven't worked in a Congressional office, but if you're keeping track of constituent corespondents with Exchange contacts associated with individual users, your system is going to break down well before 10,000 users.

Exchange isn't much better. I've heard of people having contacts 'magically' disappear when they reach absurdly high numbers such as this guys.

I don't think anyone in Congress runs their email off a Gmail account.

Sarah used yahoo.

there's a distinction that should be made between sending spam and having many contacts. Limiting the amount recipients to a message will prevent spam. Having many contacts doesn't mean the person is a spammer.

A quick google says Google Apps started around feb 2006. Let's assume the user was an early adopter, and today is mar 2011. 10000 contacts / (365 * 5 years) ~= 5 to 6 new contacts a day. Seems possible; maybe in a weekend the user will have 20 new contacts and quiet the entire week... the # of contacts collected throughout the lifetime of an inbox doesn't say anything about the need to send message to all of the contacts.

This. The guy is obviously trying to run a spam newsletter on the cheap, using the trusted status of google's MTAs to ensure deliverable spam.

Nobody can or will maintain relationships with anywhere near 10k contacts. Dunbar indicated that humans are only capable of maintaining relationships with roughly 150 people at any given point in time. This guy is overstating his requirements by nearly two orders of magnitude.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

You both are bananas.

Brad Feld is not just a VC, but is co-founder of TechStars. TechStars is kind of like YCombinator, except instead of just trying to find a handful of a super specific kind of company, they're growing a network far and wide of incubators across the entire U.S. They have programs in Boulder, New York, Boston, Seattle, and are growing even further through their "TechStars Network".

I met Brad briefly on their book tour. He's very much an "I'll look you in the eye and listen to who you are and what you're doing, and see how I can help" kind of guy. Unlike YCombinator, TechStars pledges to try and help out EVERY company who applies, with advice or connections or whatever they can do, even though they can only accept a few into their program. I'm sure he's connected former applicants to TechStars (not even accepted companies, applicants) with strategic partners he meets on the road. I'm sure he makes all kinds of crazy connections between contacts. In some sense, running an incubator and being a VC.... making connections like that is his JOB.

Brad doesn't have my contact info, but if I gave him my card and he ever contacted me, or gave my info to someone else, it would be the OPPOSITE of spam. I would be stoked to see anything in my inbox from him or someone in his network. Brad is really a "water that raises all boats" kind of person, from what I've seen.

That's very nice. I don't care who the user is, there's no way humanly possible any person can or will maintain individual contact with 10,000 people over the course of a year. Just trying to remember who half of the people were or when the last time you talked or what about would be ridiculous.

It seems to me this is why there are (for example) sales tools which help track relationships and organize aggregate contact data into a manageable system. But come on. However much of a VC rockstar Brad Feld is, he's not e-mailing or calling 10,000 people. Like most people he'll add everyone he meets to his standard contacts list, but this is not scalable, and there's probably a couple thousand people sitting in the list that either he's never had correspondence with or hasn't for a year or more, making a follow-up unlikely. Of course I am generalizing and assuming based on my own experience with PIM systems.

Instead of just adding people to a contact list and forgetting about it perhaps Brad should invest his time in a system which will provide more features tailored to the nature of his business contacts, and that way Google doesn't have to redesign its infrastructure to support 0.001% of users. That's all i'm saying.

I don't know if you're familiar with Brad Feld (post author), but he's a big-deal VC at the Foundry Group in Boulder. Most definitely not a spammer.

IMO, this is an area where 37signals has the right approach.

I run into things like this when we consolidate email systems. Its always a battle.

Weird corner cases like the guy who has 50,000 folders in his inbox, cross referenced with multiple copies of messages in folders. Then you have the guy with 75,000 objects in his Inbox. Or the one with 120 GB of email dating back 20 (!) years who must have all mail on an online mailbox and cannot use archiving.

At the end of the day, supporting the bizarro corner cases can impact your ability to support the other 99% of the users.

To make it worse, in most cases, you are just on the receiving end of a power trip or attention whoring episode anyway. So, if these people are peons, you tell them to piss off. If they are bigshots, you waste money dealing with their whims.

The 37 Signals answer is a good immediate reaction, but there is some due diligence that Google can do here, that can be used for longer term product development, as well as a sanity check of the current state of their product:

* Review the original intent with the 10,000 limitation. Was it a precautionary measure that turned out to either be justified or incorrect? Was it a technical limitation that has since gone away with DB, browser or bandwidth improvements?

* Ask the customer about their usage patterns. Can they be served with an alternate, existing product (LDAP, mailing lists, Google Docs spreadsheets)?

* Run some stats on a sample user base and project what percentage of other users will hit this limit at what point.

* Is there an opportunity to develop a new product, not for this user in particular, but something that uses contacts in a different way for those users who have a legitimate need for this many 'contacts' (large mailing list support within Gmail)?

* Start logging the number of users with this complaint internally, so that demand can be measured even if the user doesn't file a feature request.

Regardless of whether you personally think someone can maintain 10,000 relationships (they certainly can't), you can always learn from the unexpected ways other people use your product, and figure out a way to either improve it or create a separate product that can interact with it.

Is this actually a problem for more people then this guy?

I literally don't know anyone who has 10000 contacts, I also don't know anyone who actually needs 10000 contacts.

Considering Google automatically adds anyone I have an email conversation with to my contacts, I would say one day we will all get to this point, some just sooner then others. And I can think of nothing more painful then trying to prune through 10,000 contacts to figure out which ones I'd want to keep.

Considering Google automatically adds anyone I have an email conversation with to my contacts, I would say one day we will all get to this point, some just sooner then others.

My "My Contacts" list is more than 500 people after using Gmail since September 2006, and my "Other Contacts" is more than 1100 people. So if I had work that involved even more email interchange than the work I have, I could easily get to that 10,000 limit. And if a person makes a lot of use of email, that is precisely the person who will comparison-shop for different email solutions.

Maybe? I have been basically living in gmail since the start of the beta and I have < 500 contacts and I have never deleted a contact and use my email very heavily.

I'm sure in 5+ years I may get to this point, but in a year or 2 or 5, who says what this arbitrary upper limit is. Google seems to increase capacity on just about everything else, I dont see why this would be different.

I just checked and I have 2500 contacts just my virtue of using GMail for mailing list. I probably care about less than 100 of those.

There's things like contacts for every Debian and CPAN bug I've ever filed, contacts for people who change their E-Mail address every day due to using some wildcard catch + script to generate them etc.

Some people have jobs which have them make five to ten new business contacts in an average workday. No, they're not becoming best friends or anything, they're just exchanging business cards. Still, that's only five to ten years of that kind of work.

The thing is that people don't know ahead of time which contacts they need. They just put everyone they meet in their contacts. Then if someone says, "Hey, do you know so-and-so?" they can actually email or call that person right away.

I consider that spam.

It's called sales and networking. And it's valuable.

The traditional process of "sales" doesn't provide nearly as much value as it once did. We now have google and more efficient social networking available as a means of locating solutions to various business problems one may have.

I remember the halcyon days of the dot com era when hot redheaded sales reps from Exodus would take you on datacenter tours and treat you to dinner to secure a lucrative two-rack deal.

I remember pushy but friendly Oracle salespeople selling you on a $250k six-processor O7 license predicated on "well ebay's using it".

Nowadays I refuse to take vendor phone calls. If I need a solution, I google it or ask around my circle of tech friends.

The claim that sales is "valuable" is lost on me at this point.

They still have that sort of sales process in other industries.

I know a girl who works for a company that sells Expensive Things to a Big Lumber Company. Her full time job is to be fun to be around. Every weekend you'll find her and a few random BigCo executives (or formen depending on the weekend) riding jetskis, snowboarding or just buying rounds of tequila at the Mexican restaurant. Her office is at the BigCo plant.

It still happens in tech too. Drive past the Microsoft campus next time you're in Redmond. Notice how Intel has an office building next door?

I this case though people probably give him there details in expectation of getting in on something at some point if they are the right fit, whether it be mentoring, investing or deals startups and them. Doubt hes going, "need investors?, here I'll spam out 1000 of them".

Yes, most definitely. I set up gmail to automatically add everyone I reply to to my contact list and in my job today I often get 5-10 e-mails per day from potential customers, investors, partners, etc (sometimes many more). I have to be able to follow up with any one of them at any point, and while I don't need to have them in my contact list (I can search for their e-mail and copy-paste their address), it would make my job much more frustrating and time consuming. I haven't hit the 10k limit yet, but I suspect I will relatively soon. This is actually a very common use case for a huge number of business customers, it's certainly not an isolated edge case.

Sounds like an application for a database or CRM system of some sort so that you can age out the old entries. How many contacts from 3 year ago are still relevant?

True, but a similar argument applies to e-mail. How many e-mails from three years ago are still relevant? The main value proposition of GMail when it came out was that you never have to delete email anymore. Why not do the same with contacts and take the hassle out of it?

Besides, most modern CRM/ERM systems interact with e-mail (where you bcc the CRM system to add data to it). So adding a CRM system only exacerbates the problem.

It depends on what you do. Personally, I'm a pretty meticulous filer, I keep lots of paper and digital records, filed in filesystems so I can figure out wtf happened 3 or 5 years ago. (I'm a manager in a large IT organization)

Ancient email is often important to establish the context surrounding decisions that have multi-year impact.

Also, many folks use email as an ad hoc general filing system. They rely on search to find information, and email is often the ONLY system available with reasonable search ability.

If you're in a small company, this will sound insane. But in a mega-sized org like the one I work in, its essential.

You could also just keep track of about everyone you ever talked to. Just keep the contact in some database with some notes/references about him. Always better to just loose/delete the contact.

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I imagine that if you have 50K employee's and you are paying google ~50$/account/yr(2.5M/yr) (im sure if you had 50k employees you would work a deal out with google), you could work a deal to get the contact list thing straightened out.

1 User who says they are willing to pay is significantly different then a company who is paying for 50k employees.

Google apps already autocompletes on the employee list: http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...

The personal contacts is another thing. So having 10k or more employees isn't a problem for google apps, what is a problem is employees who have more than 10k personal contacts (not very common).

It bothers the computer scientist in me that they set an artificial number as a contact limit. 2^16? Okay, they made a design decision that is problematic. But 10000? Obviously someone set an arbitrary limit based on their expert opinion about the number of contacts a person might need.

I am shocked that the "expert" was wrong.

The moral of this story is that, when you pick an artificial number as an arbitrary limit, you should always pick a power of two. Or a power of two, minus one. When people hear that you can only have 65535 contacts, they'll probably assume there's a good reason.

You should coin this as "Scott's Law". It's brilliant.

> Obviously someone set an arbitrary limit based on their expert

Google is known to based their decisions on actual data, they probably noticed that most people were below eg 500 contacts and 99.9% below 9000 (or such) and decided that 10000 would be safe.

I would have been much happier if they had decided on 8138 or 16276, the latter being better.

Why those numbers... 8,192 and 16,384 perhaps?

decided that 10000 would be safe

aka, an arbitrary limit, rather than a specific technical limit.

No, Its not arbitrary. In the above mentioned scenario, the decision is based on actual data points of the current system, with possible growth projections, and a judgement call from business perspective. Hardly arbitrary.

MS did the same thing with Live Mesh. Noticed that few people were using more than 2GB, so they cut the limit to 2GB.

Both of these seem like odd decisions. The people using more than your data driven limit are likely power users -- who are also probably your best evangelists.

Furthermore, given that so few are using beyond the limit, unless there is a technical reason to set the data driven limit, you incur virtually no cost to keep the limit high. In fact it argues that increasing it to unheard of numbers, ala gmail back in the day, makes more sense.

Again, there may be some technical reason they did this, which is fine. But if they looked at their data and saw that only 1% of their users had more than 10000 contacts, then they deserve to lose all those customers, plus the full wrath and bitterness they have as a result. They made a calculated decision to explicitly screw you over.

the could have rounded down to keep things simple? it is easier to remember 10k vs 10143. would you agree?

Or they did set a minimal speed target and are able to reach that target using the current systems/algorithms as long as everyone keeps their database under 10,000 contacts. 10,001 probably would work, but the programmers verified and are able to _guarantee_ the agreed speed with 10,000

I would consider a design problem like that a bit worse than an arbitrary limit, from both the perspective that the artificial limit demonstrates someone considered that edge case and the perspective that the arbitrary limit will probably be easier to change in the future. If they're storing the contacts in a way that they're bumping up against some real constraint, it could be far more difficult to change it.

A design problem could be motivated by the need to save space (and even 2 bytes per row would save google a lot of database space). Even google doesn't have infinite storage, and there's always going to be a real limit somewhere.

The question of whether stupidity is worse than malice is one for the ages.

Can anyone explain why there would be a limit to contacts? My best guess was to prevent spam: 10,000 contacts is probably in the top 1% of users, but might be much more heavily seen in bots.

Side note: Gmail offers a "Most Contacted" feature to show you who you email the most. It might be interesting if they had a "Least Contacted" feature as well, to be able to easily remove contacts you never use.

Because it is based on BigTable and it has certain limitations designed to make it easier to implement, including a limit on how many elements one can return.

Also, 10k contacts is properly far more than most people would ever have so it is not a big deal.

Until high profile people write public complaints that hit #1 on hacker news.

Which is gonna shake google up exactly how?

99,999% of their users will never see the story. And the rest of us will have forgotten about it before the end of the week.

And the handful of people who ever face this problem will move on to some other solution.

Gmail contacts sync with mobile phones like the G1 which don't have tons of memory or processor power. Try using one of those phone with 9000+ contacts and its not a nice experience.

The limitation is there for performance reasons. Besides why is your sales guy is using gmail as his crm?

It is possible they made the limit to "protect" you from timeouts caused by performance limitations. Perhaps the contact system is still working with a weak indexing system, or maybe they send all the contacts to the browser in one giant JSON response.

Dear User: You are an exception that it would cost more to support than not to. Sorry, find something else.

Dear Brad,

You need a CRM tool. Have you looked into SalesForce? It's online, just like Google Apps.

Alternatively, you can create a second gmail account to 'archive' your least used contacts, and your primary account for your most used. I do this for archived email as well, for example.

I call hoarding. I hope he isn't trying to actually mail 10k people from his gmail account. Use a real ESP or CRM tool if you need that volume.

Refer to the original article stating the auto-adding by Google of emails Into contacts. As well as (for other comments above) that an employee of Google (not the main articles more..generic support response ticket email) is "working on a solution."

FWIW, Highrise also sets seemingly "arbitrary" limits to the number of contacts you can have in an account: http://highrisehq.com/signup

I guess both Google and 37signals do it because it's just a quick and dirty way to manage resources. There maybe be other reasons that we're not aware of though (e.g. people using more than that number of contacts might frequently be using the app for nefarious purposes?).

It's a shame because limitations like these ultimately place limits on your creativity. In the case of Highrise for example, I once had an idea to use it to manage and track communications for all of my applications users, but obviously that doesn't work if there are hard limits there.

Not sure I have a moral to my little story, except that arbitrary limits are understandable, but frustrating and unfortunate.

It's arbitrary but probably based on test data of user experience when load testing higher limits. It's exactly the same reason behind the "arbitrary" limit of 10 users being allowed to access to a shared mailbox. It's something that makes sense 99% of the time, but for that 1% of users it's pretty painful to deal with.

Creativity comes from limits.

That's a rather facile response. Is that what Google should say to the guy who is complaining in the article?

"Oh, you need more than 10,000 contacts? Well, why don't you just find a creative solution to the problem instead. Creativity comes from limits!"

Trust me, I'm sure this guy will find a creative solution to his problem, just as I ended up finding a creative solution to my own problem.

But I'd be extremely wary as a developer of presuming to know more about your customer's problem space than they do, and that all they need is a little dash of creative thinking to get around whatever limitation your software may have presented them with.

I apologize for being so oblique, but I wasn't responding to the article, merely the line:

> It's a shame because limitations like these ultimately place limits on your creativity.

I understand what you mean, but this statement still bothers me. Needing more than 10,000 contacts may be a requirement for many reasons, but creativity does not seem like one of them to me.

Gotcha. I likewise think I now better understand where you were coming from in your comment. "Creativity" was probably a poor word choice on my part -- perhaps "capabilities" would have been better, as in, "It's a shame because limitations like these ultimately place limits on what the software is capable of doing."

"Necessity is the mother of invention."

"Dear Google, I need a CRM System"

I ran into this issue as well. A lot of Googlers read this board.. Any one of them care to chime in?

EDIT: It's worth noting that loading near the 10k limit into your Google Contacts kills your browser. The current UI setup is probably one of the issues with having over 10k contacts.

Yet another loud and obnoxious user.

So, an annoyed blog entry by the sort of petulant user who bitches to his IT guy when a web-application run by another company says "You're over your limit."

No indication that they're paying for anything, just whining about the limits of a free contact system.

ETA: Fair enough, he does have some sort of enterprise support.

Mind you, this post sure has a lot of search-baiting links (like every single instance of the string "Google Apps", even in quoted blocks) pointed at other blog entries.

Dude, enjoy your 10K contact limit and your plummeting search ranking.

I'm really surprised at how many people are jumping to discredit the poster's legitimate need for more than 10k contacts. This is toxic thinking for a technical entrepreneur, to assume that any use case outside your original design is either pathological or caused by user error.

Smart developers crave this kind of feedback, so that they can figure out where their assumptions about user behavior are wrong and work to correct them.

I believe someone already mentioned it, but Gmail used to (by default) add all people you communicated with to your contact list. I didn't start using my Gmail contacts list effectively until 2010 (when I got Android), so I ended up cleaning out something like 6k contacts I accumulated over the past 5 years.

This guy doesn't need 10k contacts--he just doesn't want to go through and remove the non-essentials.

At a certain point you need to have something more than Gmail to handle that many contacts, like a CRM type application.

A classic Rolodex holds about 400 cards. So he's at 25 Rolodexes. That would be a sight to see sitting on a desk!

It's funny that everyone on this thread is like "No one needs more then 10,000 contacts! Spammer!" when Highrise's medium-sized acccount has 20k. Their big account has 30k. Only their intro plan has less than 10k.

http://highrisehq.com/signup

Wonder whether the Google Apps has it's own profit and loss as the bottom line? The response is suggestive of Google Apps team being funded by ad revenue and not really having to care too much winning and keeping it's own customers. Can anyone shed insight?

Dear Google, I stared more than 60 projects on Google Code.

So, are you a paying customer? This seems very unthoughtful of them. Actually i was considering evaluating them for enterprise use, looks like i will have to postpone the evaluation.

Omgwtf? So yeah, wow they finally found someone who hit the 10000 limit solution. Maybe they'll make the 10k browser limit turn into a more dynamic/pageable solution and maybe they won't. Choosing to solve browser issue with 10k at the time was probably the right engineering answer to the problem at hand. The solution is complicated and time consuming and time for engineers costs money.

So yeah, just use another enterprise app instead. You don't really have much choice.

This is for individual contacts, not the email directory. Google has several customers with >10,000 accounts.

It does seem to have a lot of weird artificial limits around the edge that no amount of begging or paying will ever change.

I know people are saying stuff like this doesn't matter, but I manage at least 15 domains on GDomains now, and I will probably hesitate a bit before adding another. Can I trust Google Domains to grow as my business does? I can't believe you can't pay for more space..

I guess you'll have to find a new place for email when your business grows beyond 10,000 employees...

When you have 10,000 employees, you could probably just get a team to author their own version of gmail.

Are you talking about the limits in the linked article? It's 10,000 contacts in the address book that are limited, not total employees - though that is probably limited too.

Sounds like a humble brag to me.

I'm not even sure if I believe this.

10k works out to be 40 new contacts per business day( 5 days per week, 52 weeks minus 2 for vacation ) for a year. Let's assume this guy has been "at it" for 4 years. That's still 10 new contacts every day.

Nobody who has actual work to do is going to contact, establish rapport, communicate enough to know the contact would be valuable, and then most importantly, maintain the relationship with 10 NEW people every single working day for 4 years straight.

I love how many of comments on this article have no idea who Brad Feld is, and nobody bothered to read his bio before deciding he's a spammer. He's one of the more famous tech entrepreneurs and investors. He's had companies acquired, sits on the board of a bunch of big companies, and runs TechStars. Networking is his job, and he's been doing it for over 20 years. If he wanted to run a spam newsletter (which he has no reason to do), he has the resources to use something way better than Gmail. ;)

"Famous" is a relative thing. You're the first person in a 75+ comment thread to admit to knowing who he is.

I know who he is. But whether he's famous is immaterial. You all are assuming that just because you can't imagine jobs that would require you to maintain a database of 10k contacts that there are none.

Actually, the complaint is quite the opposite, that people are "unfairly" assuming that he is working in a set of jobs where such a database makes sense.

Thanks for pointing this out. I've removed the spam claim.

I still stand by the research that makes it evident human beings can't maintain relationships with more than a couple hundred people at a time, and I doubt very much that Feld( or any other human being )is capable of even remembering a small fraction of the people on that list.

He is an investor. 10 people a day is not unreasonable. You might meet 4 teams of 4 people almost everyday pretty easily.

Maybe what Mr. Feld should've said is "First!" and yes, then moved on to another solution, but they're paying $50/yr/user so I can see how a common sense approach would probably solve this for the limited number of +10K contact-having users.

That being said, I'm probably one of those 10K contacts and say what you will, Brad has always responded to email and been a helpful resource to myself and the community without asking for anything in exchange. Not exactly a contact whore. Or a lightweight.

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