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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

>It's not even like the early days of Gmail abuse where people were using it as a cheap web disk, consuming way more storage and bandwidth than Gmail could've reasonably estimated

Was this actually a thing? AFAIK even at the start they had hard limits. The only thing "unlimited" about it was that they promised to steadily increase the storage cap.

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Yeah... back in the day, someone made a virtual file system layer that could span 1 or more Gmail accounts, basically using it as a block storage thing. IIRC (it's been a while) there was also some built-in redundancy, like the same file would be stored redundantly across multiple Gmail accounts in case one got deleted. Kinda like an early cloud RAID.

That was before even CAPTCHAs were common, I think, and so getting new Gmail accounts was very easy.

Eventually Google revised their ToS and clamped down, of course.

I'll see if I can track down some historical links, but it was a long time ago...

Edit: one of them was called GmailFS: https://handwiki.org/wiki/GmailFS

Old slashdot (remember that?) post from 2004: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/04/08/29/0237213/gmailfs---...

Right. They announced with a 1GB limit. At the time, this felt unlimited. The competition was offering around 5-10MB.

Yeah, I apologize if I was unclear. Didn't mean to imply that Gmail was unlimited, only that it was in a similar situation (i.e. offering way more disk than most users needed, with the bet that 99% of them won't use anywhere near the limit).

Yup. And back then upload sites were fairly uncommon... MegaUpload was 2 years after G-Mail, but IIRC you had to pay to do a whole lot without time/bandwidth limits.

And as an idea of scale, no, you can't fit a DVD in 1GB. but you could definitely hold a CD, or something between VHS and DVD quality of a movie.

Me? I just used it to hold on to base drivers for my systems and pictures I wanted to not lose. It worked great for a few years.

They also had a “gimmick” where you could literally watch your storage increase down to the billionth percentile or something like that. I seem to remember a counter at the bottom saying my free space available was “1.053746843GB” and it would be moving.

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