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An update to storage policies across your Google Account

blog.google

331–340 of 427 posts

Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account

#331
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account

#332
post #154
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been very happy at Fastmail for the past few years. Their customer support has been quick and very helpful for me. It’s paid so I know that I am a customer and not a product. When I signed up I just forwarded my old gmail account to it. Now it sounds like I should finally update my email address for all the services still using it!

FastMail is probably the best among the bunch but it's still worse than GMail: - There is no "always display images from this contact" option if you don't want to load images automatically. You have to click on "show images" every time you read an emai, even from a trusted contact. - There is no "open mailto: links on FastMail" option on desktop. - Spam filter is too aggressive. I've missed too many legit mails while…

They will also delete your data if you stop paying. So, if this got you to quit gmail, fastmail is not your destination.

https://www.fastmail.com/help/account/accountexpired.html

Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account

#333
post #86

They stop your gmail from receiving inbound emails if you don't pay to upgrade for storage [15gb]. Within 24 hours! I just reached that, and the first alert I see on my email [1] feels quite threatening. It's like I came home, and there's an unexpected eviction on the door. IMO, this is way worse that account inactivity. Who remembers that ever-increasing ticker on the gmail homepage that advertised "Your storage wit…

How is it unexpected, you pushed your inbox to limits, its not like it happens overnight, if you think google is lying use an IMAP client and check it yourself, also google storage is spread across all the services, check if you are backing up your phone or photos(unknowingly).

Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account

#334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's mainly media. What's the deal with deleting emails of all things, as if they couldn't support that aspect indefinitely?

People use email as a sneaky method of storage

Sometimes it's the most practical way to share photos and documents, especially when iphones are involved.

Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right! Maybe they are cutting email because it is not as profitable. I agree with the other poster who brought up storage costs not keeping up with growth of stuff to store. I wonder what this means for youtube...

Email is the tightest grip Google has on me. Maybe YouTube. But their Google music fail, their rising phone prices, their bait and switch photo storage, and low quality search results have caused me to change. Any alternatives to Chrome, Firefox on both Android and Desktop are buggy, I want a different company?

If you're okay with Blink under the hood, take a look at Vivaldi. It's made by some of the same people who did the original Opera, and is very much in the same spirit - instead of the modern trend of bare-bones browser + third-party extensions, it comes with "batteries included".

Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account

#336

I’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…

A premise one hears fairly often is that online advertising sucks, but it's a necessary evil to get all this cool free stuff from Google. So if the cool free stuff is less cool and less free that raises questions about whether there should still be online advertising. I don't actually subscribe to the above, it's just something you hear again and again.

People (majority) hate both - paying for a service and advertising. They are a business after all. If you compare it with Apple, Google's storage is still a lot cheaper and offer more free storage upfront. Sure, Apple probably doesn't make money by scanning the content for advertising, but you're already seeing another (sibling comment to yours) calling it 'Bullshit' because they would now start deleting content of inactive users for 2 years.

Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account

#337
post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Takeout doesn't seem to work for me. Any time I setup an export, they appear to be scheduled, but never run. If I go to takeout.google.com now, I see: "Export 1 of 1 will start on 18 November 2020" Any idea what I'm supposed to do about that?

Sue yourself and have your lawyer send Google a letter demanding your data as evidence.

If that really is the only solution. What a sad world

Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account

#338
post #94
post #4

> "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/

Curious if one would even receive the notification emails prior to content deletion. Once you hit the 15gb limit, you stop receiving emails within 24 hours. 2 years is plenty time versus "Hey. You are out of storage. In 24 hours, we're cutting off communication." [1] [1] https://imgur.com/a/fBrlu4t

The one time I ran out of quota in Gmail, because Google backup for MacOS has a serious bug, I did not receive the notice because the same batch job that disables delivery for your account is the one that sends you the email. I didn’t get the message until a week later when I figured it out and deleted some photos. Pretty dumb.

Also, Gmail delivers an in-band message about your quota, but not in Inbox, Inbox for iOS, nor the Gmail app for iOS nor Gmail for mobile web. ONLY Gmail classic for desktop web. So I didn’t get those banners, either.

In other words I still find this quota system difficult to use despite the fact that I was the tech lead of Gmail delivery SRE for years.

Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account

#339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail doesn’t provide a way to delete the big emails. They just let you go over limit, you don’t know what is consuming resources, and you get charged for it. So, like AWS.

Gmail search is very powerful. Try searching: has:attachment larger:10MB

Ok but there’s no way you actually understand how attachments are counted against your quota unless you’re a google insider or they radically improved the UI since I last did this.

Re: An update to storage policies across your Google Account

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email is the tightest grip Google has on me. Maybe YouTube. But their Google music fail, their rising phone prices, their bait and switch photo storage, and low quality search results have caused me to change. Any alternatives to Chrome, Firefox on both Android and Desktop are buggy, I want a different company?

If you're okay with Blink under the hood, take a look at Vivaldi. It's made by some of the same people who did the original Opera, and is very much in the same spirit - instead of the modern trend of bare-bones browser + third-party extensions, it comes with "batteries included".

+1 for Vivaldi. I can promise you the people behind it just want to make a great browser.
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