Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily.


Felix Salmon is unhappy with Google:

Yesterday afternoon, I started wondering why my steady stream of emails seemed to have come to a halt. It didn’t take long to get the answer: emails to me were being bounced back to their senders as undeliverable, on the grounds that my Gmail account was over quota. Naturally, I immediately paid Google the $5 they wanted to upgrade to 20 GB of storage from the free 7.5 GB.

What follows is a long post about Google’s annoying ways, and I sympathize. But what I’m really curious about is the amount of space apparently used by Google mail. I just checked my mail directory, and it uses 3 GB of space for 110,000 emails (including the associated full-text index files). So either (a) Felix has nearly 300,000 emails in his archive or (b) Google uses a really inefficient storage algorithm for email.

Probably the former. Which is an impressive bucket of email. But I guess it’s not surprising. I’ve got eight years worth of email archived, but the fact is that I delete about 90% of the email I get these days because most of it is auto-generated press releases and so forth. If I didn’t bother doing that, I’d probably be well over 7.5 GB too and pushing half a million emails.

That’s….disturbing. In the past eight years I’ve received half a million emails. And I’m probably a piker compared to some. It’s amazing that we keep up at all, isn’t it?

BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things they don’t like—which is most things that are true.

No one gets to tell Mother Jones what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

payment methods

BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things they don’t like—which is most things that are true.

No one gets to tell Mother Jones what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate