Happy [Early] Birthday, GMail!

Five years ago (tomorrow), Google surprised us with the biggest April Fool's joke ever: a free email account with 1GB of space. It was unheard of at the time. Everyone knew it was a joke. For the next several months, those all-valuable GMail invitations were being sold, pawned and auctioned every which way. Apparently it wasn't a joke.

As of today that 1GB has increased to 7,310MB and I realized that today was a perfect day to do some quick math. I got my gmail account on June 28, 2004 so I've had it for 1,738 days (including today) and during that time I've consumed 3052MB of storage space. This works out to 1.67MB per day.

The 200,000+ emails from the Cocoa-Dev mailing list probably has something to do with that.

If you log out of GMail and look at the login page, there's a counter there that shows the increase in per-user available storage space. Over the period of about an hour and a half I found that it grew at a rate of 0.35MB per day.

That's weird though. Because while the actual growth over the past five years is in excess of 6GB (3.445MB per day), at 0.35MB per day it would only grow by a little over 1GB during the next nine years.

Who knows which fate we'll get. Probably something in between. Just to be safe, I plotted both of them. First, assuming that it only grows at the rate that I observed earlier today, I'm going to completely run out of space sometime in early 2018. And it's never too early to start fretting the future.

But, if we assume that the past five years is representative of the future, then capacity will increase approximately twice as fast as I use it.

The variable I haven't accounted for is the increase in what society deems to be the maximum allowable attachment size. For instance, Aimee emailed me 57MB of pictures not too long ago. In 2000, I would have had to set up an FTP server and have her upload them. If we're emailing each other HD-quality videos, 3.445MB per day isn't going to cut it.