Well it sounds too good to be true - 1GB of webmail when the opposition are offering at most tens of Megabytes - and the timing of the announcement is rather startling to say the least. Also Erik as a beta tester? A chap they shafted with Google AdSense, does that sound likely to you?
Well maybe, just maybe, Gmail might be real. I suspect Erik's taking advantage of the fun and games and pulling people's legs a little with some faked screenshots. But, when you look at the details, it's feasible.
- First up - storage costs, commodity hard drives are around $1/GB, so Google don't really have to sell much advertising per user to cover hardware costs.
- 1GB of email, seriously how many people hang onto that much email? I certainly don't, I've got most of my email for the last 10-15 years here and it's far, far less than 1GB, ok I delete spam and viruses, and remove attachments but all the same, 1GB is a *lot* of email. I suspect the average user would more likely use 10-20MB. So you can cut the hardware costs significantly.
- Compression - given that the majority of email is text, html or attached documents, if Google were to compress before storing to disk I'd expect space savings of at least 50%, maybe much more.
- As for the timing of the announcement, well it certainly doesn't hurt to get people talking about your product, does it? :-)
- The paranoid card - if you believe that Google are run or funded by some evil organisation who want to know as much as possible about your life, then don't you think they could find out one hell of a lot by having access to all your email?
