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An update to storage policies across your Google Account
321–330 of 427 posts
Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Yes. I can prove that this is real There's also at least two alternative explanations. I also get a lot of emails to an account I own from someone who keeps using my email instead of theirs. You'd think they would have noticed they aren't receiving them by now, but apparently not. Are you also totally sure that it's not just someone else entering an email address they don't own for work and party invites? And for a…
Another explanation is the address changes Google introduced. I’m not sure when, but my firstlast@gmail.com became addressable as first.last@gmail.com. Someone else originally created first.last@gmail.com and I get their emails.
Periods have always been discarded by Gmail when routing mail, as well as signing in. If you own firstlast@gmail.com, you've owned first.last@gmail.com all along, as well as fi.r.s.t.la.s.t@gmail.com for that matter.
You're getting that other person's email because someone has the wrong address for them.
Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account
#323next week: Amazon announces "forever" email addresses
Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account
#324> "If you're over your storage limit for two years, Google may delete your content across Gmail, Drive and Photos," the company said. That's different from just deleting all your data because you're inactive. Which is it? Edit: it seems both. Here's the blog post (maybe this is a better link): https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-policy-update/
I have read about users who are receiving someone else's mail. They have some account that has been set to forward mail. It then appears that either (a) Google assigns the address to someone else (perhaps due to inactivity) or (b) someone else keeps inadvertently typing this email address. The mail gets forwarded to some other user. If this is true, this calls the whole notion of "Gmail security" (and more generally…
Google doesn't recycle Gmail addresses. https://webapps.stackexchange.com/a/90016
What does happen somewhat often though, is that people receive other people's mail because it's been misaddressed by the sender.
Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account
#325The same happened to my old "...@hotmail.com" email, Microsoft deleted old childhood emails, still bitter about that. Per https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/oemail... , the limit is 365 days of inactivity.
Also a massive security hole. I needed to do a password reset on my old ebay account, but the hotmail account it was attached to was deleted, so I just created a new hotmail account with the same name, and reset my password. I've done this maybe three or four time, because I haven't used hotmail since high school, so they keep deleting it. A lot of people also have password resets on gmail linked to their old hotmail…
You're actually talking about a different thing than parent. You can delete account data without recycling the account name. Nowadays, Microsoft still deletes inactive accounts, but they don't recycle the names.
Of course, phone numbers are recycled by telephone providers. So that'll be fun in a few years.
Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is reasonable. Delete some filter emails won't take you 10 minutes
It's not that easy. I have 15 years of emails, including deeply personal stuff. I've deleted all the unread mailing lists. I've deleted the big files. I've gone through numerous social and advertising emails and mass-deleted. Yet I'm stuck on like 14.98 Gb and every time I hit the threshold, Gmail starts bugging me to do more. How can I even tell if I have that much email? They could just be saying "oh, you have 14.9…
> How can I even tell if I have that much email?
You could fetch everything using IMAP and check size locally.
Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account
#327The recent changes to Google Workspace effectively increased my per seat cost by 70%. Im doing 2021 budgeting now and I can save about $200/head by killing Google entirely (and Slack and Asana) and just using Microsoft 365.
Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account
#328Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, 4.3 petabytes a day . Operating at Google's scale these days is just nuts.
One of the advantages of being on an exponential growth curve is that this figure has been way lower in the past. Just go back 5 years and it's only a fraction of that. 5 more years and it's even lower. The gmail/drive/etc. data that come from Google's first decade of existence probably fit into those 4.3 petabytes.
I used to work on a certain Google product and I remember thinking a petabyte was big when our raw content store crossed that milestone. Now Linus Tech Tips can put that much storage in a single box.
Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account
#330I’m often the first to criticise Google but what they’re doing here isn’t exactly unprecedented. Free online mail providers have been removing inactive users since the 90s. Cloud storage providers remove inactive free users. A lot of companies even have a far more aggressive time line (pretty sure 90s Yahoo Mail was in the region of months rather than years) so 2 years seems pretty generous to me. At the end of the d…
Part of the reason everyone switched to GMail is because, unlike the other free online mail providers, they didn't do this kind of bullshit.
Maybe? It certainly wasn't why I switched. The gmail interface was so much cooler and faster than any of the other providers, and gmail's spam detection actually worked. The amount of storage available was nice, but I certainly gave no thought to the notion that Google would preserve my stuff indefinitely if I didn't use it.