Hacker News Reader

Comment by xiphias2 | Hacker News Reader

Because the reason I signed up for GMail in 2004 was that they promised that they keep my emails forever

They promised 1GB, had a counter that slowly increased and thens settled at 15GB, as I remember.

Sure, but I’m right now paying for 1TB space, and I can easily forget for example if a credit card expires. Google makes enough money from my subscriptions to at least write my data to a tape when I stop paying, so that I can access it again even 10 years later when I start paying again.

Forget and never logged into an account for 2 years? If you don't need to log into an email account for 2 years you don't need the data.

Not true. You might need all kind of information years later. Bills, account statements and then of course photos. Recently had to arrange a funeral and noted we didn't have a photo of the deceased. Of course many had been taken years ago, but we couldn't find any.

Isn't the opposite also true, that some people would expect them to delete that data?

Seems a damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario.

Plus, unless that was part of the contract, why do you expect it? They're a company, you get what you pay for.

There's no way they can justify devoting resources (i.e., staff, machines, tapes, storage space) and maintaining processes to do this when they're delivering services for billions of users, especially given that, as someone else has said, for privacy reasons people would assume/expect that expired data is automatically deleted.

They started with 1GB, and promised it would grow with you and that you would never run out of space.

At that point, it was just email, though, and not other files.

Despite that, I still managed to run out of space a while back and had to start deleting emails that I didn't care about. I was quite disappointed in them.

I don't recall ever seeing a promise like that made. But supposing it was, there's a time in everyone's life where they have to learn that nothing is forever. This is especially true of promises made for no compensation.

> you would never run out of space

You do see how that can't possibly applying to literally everyone, right? You can't use the argument that "they said it would grow with me" to store 1TB of emails and be surprised when they start charging you.

15GB is a lot. Even if you receive 5 emails with 1mb attachments every single day, that's still almost 10 years. With normal text emailed, you will never run out until you die. Most cloud providers give 5GB. It's fair to say that it has grown with you to a reasonable storage size. If you need more than 15GB, it's fair to say you're beyond that.

> With normal text emailed, you will never run out until you die.

I have an account that received only LKML. So just text, not a single attachment. And all written by humans (although many of them and some copying.) The account run out of space after ~ 7 years of LKML.

(Need to check whether the limit is really 15 GB. I think it stopped growing at 4 or 6 GB.)

Well, it's 15GB shared with Photos and Drive, so if you do use those other products, then yes you do have less space total.

I checked. It's really 15 GB of textual emails, from 2012 until December 2018 when it hit the limit.

Admittedly I don't know many cases with such a traffic.

So I cleaned up that 15 GB mailbox a bit. I had previously deleted all messages over 500KB in size. Still several millions of messages left (all from 2014 to 2018.) Don't even know how to count them, because Gmail counts only conversations. Maybe it can be done via IMAP or the API, but I'd expect hitting limits on the way, so I did not spend any time trying.

The irony is that Gmail cannot delete more than a couple of thousand messages from Trash/The Bin in one go. It says "All messages deleted", but when you refresh you see that it's not true. You need iterations. I guess they are using something what AWS calls a lambda to empty the bin (don't recall the Google term) and that job hits a limit.

Yeah, I don't use that mailbox for anything serious at the moment. Just an experiment...

Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/1150/

That time, Google's motto was "do no evil" .

Reply on news.ycombinator.com