Monday, October 22, 2007

Gmail joins the Mailbox size increase Competition

It seems that the gush of high capacity hard disks which have hit the market predominantly finds its way to the Data Centres around the world which powers the E-mail Industry.Recently Microsoft Hotmail Live increasing the mail box size to 5GB and Yahoo Mail celebrated its 10th anniversary by providing a mailbox size of Infinity from May 2007.Gmail which has remained the leader of the pack joins in for the fray too. Gmail which came into being in 2004 with a whooping mailbox size of 1 GB gave out 2GB in 2005 and released a "Infinity + 1" plan by which the mailbox size counter was always kept on the move.A graph outlining their plan attracted many Gmailians in 2005 and it is shown at the side
Gmailians would have noticed that their mailbox size have crossed 4 GB by now and speculative MailBox sizes are predicted all over the Internet.But the answer lies in your Gmail homepage itself.The counter is incremented by a javascript in the homepage where they set the limit to be achieved at a specific point in time.As per that, the following stats are arrived

Apr 1 2007 13:30 2835 MB
Oct 12 2007 13:30 2912 MB
Oct 23 2007 12:30 4321 MB
Jan 4 2008 13:30 6283 MB
Jan 17 2038 13:30 43008 MB
Jan 2 3456 12:30 number.MAX_VALUE = 1.79E+308

People @ Google Inc seems to have immense foresight however one question still lingers in my mind.The number.MAX_VALUE is the largest number could be represented and a value above this is called as infinity. So if Gmail has to stick to their plan of "Infinity + 1" then they have to score two more :)

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