Gmail Inbox Dynamic Size
I'm sure many of the technology-literate will remember when Google first rolled out their GMail service. As I recall, everyone thought it was an April Fool's joke. After all, Google is famous for them. And the concept of one gigabyte of storage for your online email was revolutionary.
A year later, Google bumped the size up to 2 GB.
If you are like me, whenever you log in to GMail, you might glance for a moment at the rapidly changing counter at the bottom of the page:
"Over 2741.225060 megabytes (and counting) of free storage"
"Over 2741.225124 megabytes (and counting) of free storage"
"Over 2741.225173 megabytes (and counting) of free storage"
Have you ever investigated this counter?
Interested in when we'd hit the magical 3GB mark (3072MB), I took a look at the source code for the GMail homepage. Surprisingly, it was not a server-side update, but just a standard javascript function. Delving a little deeper, I investigated how the javascript worked. The key behind it all is this array:
[ 1136102400000, 2680 ]
[ 1149145200000, 2730 ]
[ 1167638400000, 2800 ]
The datestamp is on the left side, and the GMail size on the right side. The datestamps are standard unix timestamps (in milliseconds). Here's what that tells us:
January 1st, 2006 : 2680 megabytes
June 1st, 2006 : 2730 megabytes
January 1st, 2007 : 2800 megabytes
Until those numbers are updated, we will incrementally be counting upward from June 1st's value of 2730, up to January 1st's value of 2800. (And if we look at today, July 5th's value, we see this is true, with 2741MB.)
Researching on the web, I found several sites that had investigated this code in the past:
July 31, 2005 (Sree's Tech Notes)
August 25th, 2005 (Antimail)
As well as a site that has continually been updating the count: (GMail is increasing mailboxes size)
It looks like we used to be increasing the size at about 100MB per month, but at the current rate, it looks like we won't see 3GB for another 2 years. Hopefully, the next update from Google will show us the exact time that we can expect our 3GB inbox (maybe for GMail's 4 year birthday?). Or maybe they have slowed down to make it look even more dramatic when they announce a 500GB inbox... or a 1TB inbox. And maybe I should stop dreaming...
Speaking of large inboxes, how many people have even filled up their 2GB inbox?
A year later, Google bumped the size up to 2 GB.
If you are like me, whenever you log in to GMail, you might glance for a moment at the rapidly changing counter at the bottom of the page:
"Over 2741.225060 megabytes (and counting) of free storage"
"Over 2741.225124 megabytes (and counting) of free storage"
"Over 2741.225173 megabytes (and counting) of free storage"
Have you ever investigated this counter?
Interested in when we'd hit the magical 3GB mark (3072MB), I took a look at the source code for the GMail homepage. Surprisingly, it was not a server-side update, but just a standard javascript function. Delving a little deeper, I investigated how the javascript worked. The key behind it all is this array:
[ 1136102400000, 2680 ]
[ 1149145200000, 2730 ]
[ 1167638400000, 2800 ]
The datestamp is on the left side, and the GMail size on the right side. The datestamps are standard unix timestamps (in milliseconds). Here's what that tells us:
January 1st, 2006 : 2680 megabytes
June 1st, 2006 : 2730 megabytes
January 1st, 2007 : 2800 megabytes
Until those numbers are updated, we will incrementally be counting upward from June 1st's value of 2730, up to January 1st's value of 2800. (And if we look at today, July 5th's value, we see this is true, with 2741MB.)
Researching on the web, I found several sites that had investigated this code in the past:
July 31, 2005 (Sree's Tech Notes)
August 25th, 2005 (Antimail)
As well as a site that has continually been updating the count: (GMail is increasing mailboxes size)
It looks like we used to be increasing the size at about 100MB per month, but at the current rate, it looks like we won't see 3GB for another 2 years. Hopefully, the next update from Google will show us the exact time that we can expect our 3GB inbox (maybe for GMail's 4 year birthday?). Or maybe they have slowed down to make it look even more dramatic when they announce a 500GB inbox... or a 1TB inbox. And maybe I should stop dreaming...
Speaking of large inboxes, how many people have even filled up their 2GB inbox?
posted by Alias:Kilroy at 10:36 AM
1 Comments:
Great post.
But it would take me a lot longer to use even 1GB as 5000 emails are only using 608MB
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