Wired: Gmail Bug Sparks Storage Rumors
CNET: Google tests waters with terabyte e-mail limit
Gmailers to settle
for a small cluster
As free email providers play partial catch-up with Google's Gmail offer of a cool gigabyte, the search giant appeared to up the ante by three orders of magnitude. Some Gmail beta testers found their accounts given an entire terabyte, which is about 400 billion pages of data, coincidentally about the same figure as the number of stars in the galaxy.
Unfortunately for them, the change was a mistake and proved very temporary. The Saganesque storage capacity would have been well beyond almost all PC hard drive capacities, making the Gmail storage the largest potential repository for users. Wired reported that Google officials have stated that the error was due to a software bug and was quickly corrected.
