Google vows to increase Gmail storage limit

A better headline would be, "Google increases Gmail storage limit, pledges quicker storage updates," but whatever: Computerworld has the story:People using Google Inc.'s Gmail service are sucking up storage space faster than the company can add it.Google said on Friday it is speeding up the rate at which it addsstorage space for its Gmail Web-based e-mail service due to theincreased storage requirements for attachments such as photos."A few of you are using Gmail so much that you're running out ofspace, so to make good on our promise, today we're announcing we arespeeding up our counter and giving out more free storage," wrote RobSiemborski, a Google engineer on the Gmail blog.On Friday, the counter on the Gmail login page stood at more than2,935MB, or about 2.9GB, of storage, and was rising, but the counter isan illustration rather than a hard limit.Google started gradually increasing Gmail storage in April 2005 whenthe service turned one year old. Google's Gmail was immediately popularwhen it launched in 2004, offering free accounts with 1GB of storage,but this year has been surpassed by its rivals.So I was curious to see how this affected my own Gmail account. In addition to Gmail, I pay Google for what was previously 25 GB of Picasaweb photo storage. But it looks like this was just upped to 40 GB. And my Gmail is up to 3.17 GB right now, though it too can feed off the additional storage if need be. Interesting.