dear friend,
Google does offers 2.5mb approx space since i've used 73% of its space till now!
Don't ask me what i did of that space..actually got all softwares on my mail account.
Even i do wonder how come they offer so much space and manage for the bandwidth..
They are outstanding at the moment.

Because of the people they get each day, they would require lots of bandwidth and space. And think about how many people are using google right now. Thats a lot of people. You can find almost anything there. They have more space than Trap17 has combined with many other top hosting companies and communities.

It's not just gmail that takes up a lot of space on their servers. You have all of the cached websites for their accelerator, highly-detailed maps of the whole world for Google Earth, Their entire SMS service, all of the code for their products, databases of ads for AdSence,and more. I do believe that they do have the largest storage capasity of all companies, militaries, and or private companies. I have only one explaniation. Their stock . It hovers around $400-$500 per share. I believe that is the highest price for a share currently in the world. Then, if you take into the account how many shares people buy daily, and factor in how much they get for advertising with AdSense, you get a inhumanely large number.

But keep in mind Google also has to balance resources considering their expanding range of services.. ie Google Earth, Talk, Mail and so on. It's just like our mate 'Bill' and his range of 'MSN' services

I wouldnt be suprised if "marketed" gmail as 2.6 gigs but the servers initially gave the user say 250meg or so, but it doesnt really say it when the user logs in. The server gradually expands to 2.6 gig when the user goes over particular limits untill it reaches 2.6g.

They must have a lot! I mean think! 2 GB each. And there was a topic showing one guys who had used 1500mb. Then there are the 30gigs email services that offer thirty gigabytes. You just couldn't use it all

There servers must be huge though. Hey if anyone finds out tell me. Thanks for the topic too.

I just am wandering how many harddrives this would take...there is no such thing as 1 terabyte harddrive or at least not one that I know of...

I think google just like own most of the interent or something broght it all off of yahoo and bill gates and to keep their service free they lend the actual servers to web hosts who require a small amount of the space on the server to host a hosting service that is mega expensive just so that they can pay for googles fees. but thats just a thought and maybe a silly one at that...

maybe thats why you get really cheap hositng cos they aint been taken over by google yet?

i dunno but google must own helll of a lot of the internet to be able to do what they are doing...

What would be the problem if it was only 200 megs, and then increaced? You still get the 2 gigs, or how ever much. But, like I said before, they have billions of dollars to invest in their services. Yes, I do understand that they have to distrobute the money to fund their programs, pay employees, etc... but, if you consider that the average price of a 500GB is around $250-$350, and if you have 1 million dollars to spend, you will have somewhere around 1,600 terabytes of storage space. My numbers might not be very accurate, but you get the picture.

BTW, back when The Screen Savers was on TechTV, they had an experime nt with gmail when it first came out, and they filled up in 4 hours by posting the address on their website, and asked people to e-mail messages to it.

I say the must have like 10000 the thing after terabytes a week.

if that happens everyone would hate google and never come near it again. its hard to belive that they have so much space, but they might have something higher that terabytes, mabey like googlebytes, that holds 1,000,000,000,000,0000,000,000 terabytes. or mabye they got some super compressing techonology that perfectly compresses data with it loosing any data during the coompression. these google guys are like some of the best engineers in the world. so you never know. last year they highered some the best engineers around the world. they could be building some stuff that wont be availbable to the public untill like 1020. i wish someone wrote an undergroud aricle about all the secerets of google. if you know one please post it. im sure everyone would love to read it. and mabey we can finally figure out whats up with google.
maybe we should all start a googlewatch website and call it googlewatch.com. microsoft has one so should google reply and will see what we can do.