I too feel on the same lines. They might be over allotting the space assuming not many will ever reach their limit... Also, they might have lot of compression techniques that actually lower the space they need to store your mails...

As for space... I feel they have oodles of it... coz just imagine the indexes that they have for google search.. also the amount of space they wud need if their new service that saves search history is used.. That wud save almost every search on google... ??????????????

I suppose that itself would create huge huge chunk of data and I dont think I know the exact numbers even to calculate the storage that would be required...

Cheers.

it could've been pratical... look, they give 2 gigs of space,, then why the 10 mb limit for uploading??(the whole point is, they are not comfortable with you using up their space.. then why offer such massive space?)

see, so they dont want us to know how much space google actually has,, its nearly impossible to flood a 2 gig email account, and who on earth is goin to upload 10 megs 200 times?? as it is the upload speeds are bad... so only the people at gmail actually know the real space...
but we can solve this problem.. we get a gmail account and we all share the password and we all upload files..

Yeah Google probably doesnt actually have 2 gig per person but i would guess that they use a compresion algorithm to cut down on the size needed. I know that numerous algorithms outhere (yes ones better than winzip) can shrink data to extremely small sizes. All google would have to do then is shrink everyones mail, and when they log in, unshrink it onto a temp holding space until they time out.

Defionatly a compression algoritum. No arguing there!

Back to the space. What does google offer?
Gmail (2168mb/user)
generic search (8,058,044,651 page indexs)
page caches (assuming 8,058,044,651 caches)
image thumbnail index and thumbs (1,187,630,000 thumbnails)
satelite images (unthinkable numbers)
Blogs (?)
google video uploads (upload.video.google.com)
translitation of all pages (something like 70 languages)
google groups messages
catalogues (6,600 full color)
"my search history"
web accelerator (whatever that is? webaccelerator.google.com/)

To add to the list, I heard that all information stored on google servers are saved 3 times seperated but at least one physical swich, infact appeantrly there was a fire that brought out six trucks, and didn't hurt the system as a whole. So X3 everything on this list.

Well, first of all, I'd just like to say that finding out how much space Google has on it's servers is like saying how many planets there are in the Universe. Google is such a big company that I would not underestimate it to have at least over 10 000 terabytes of storage. As others have mentioned above, Google would not simply give out "raw-space" to everyone, the 2 GB you get from Gmail is actaully existent only when you reuqire that much space.

If you were to add the thousands of KeyHole satelite images that Google has, one can only imagine....

I don't know how, but I'm glad they've done it. I have regularly used close to 98 % of my 1 Gig, now it's down to about 30%!!!
They do indeed rock...they also don't have those damn flash ads Yahoo has that slow down my connection. I'm moving all my important stuff to Gmail.

Maybe they will offer more than 3 GB per account, but that will never get filled up. So their servers don't have to be as large as [3 GB] x [number of members].
Still, their storage space must be huge.
I suppose the average storage space in a few years will be max 250 MB/account, the same as Yahoo and Hotmail are offering. Unless more people are using Gmail as a hard drive of course.

I guess they have pretty much the same webspace amount as Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail. what they have is a very good marketing strategy, they gave us so much webspace because they are very sure that we couldn't use all of those spaces. if they are poeple who could use up all of those more than two gigabytes, im sure they are just a percentage of the total Gmail users worldwide. there are poeple like mo who still delete emails so, there would be enough for every one of us.

For all those who use that much space, there is myself, using less then 1%!

Well, I have 2 gmail accounts... one is pure mail (around 20mb...) the other one is used as storage space (I mean, one giga for free!!!!), and in couple of days, I uploaded there ALL my mailbox (talking about years and years of mail - work backup mail included - and that's A LOT!) and I'm currently running on 700mb more or less... so i think that they have all that space for their clients, but i'm also sure that whenever people will start exploiting this chance... well, goodbye gmail! Too expensive to manage, as simple as that. No wonder they are now trying whatever move passes throught heir mind to increase market share... web accelerator, google toolbar, personalized startpage... first step towaards downhill, that's my best shot. That's why I have a dvd backup of all my things... he he he