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Dear Google, I Have More Than 10,000 Contacts
- alain94040 16y agoDear Brad, You need a CRM tool. Have you looked into SalesForce? It's online, just like Google Apps.
- eggbrain 16y agoCan anyone explain why there would be a limit to contacts? My best guess was to prevent spam: 10,000 contacts is probably in the top 1% of users, but might be much more heavily seen in bots. Side note: Gmail offers a "Most Contacted" feature to show you who you email the most. It might be interesting if they had a "Least Contacted" feature as well, to be able to easily remove contacts you never use.
- GICodeWarrior 16y agoIt is possible they made the limit to "protect" you from timeouts caused by performance limitations. Perhaps the contact system is still working with a weak indexing system, or maybe they send all the contacts to the browser in one giant JSON response.
- tomjen3 16y agoBecause it is based on BigTable and it has certain limitations designed to make it easier to implement, including a limit on how many elements one can return. Also, 10k contacts is properly far more than most people would ever have so it is not a big deal.
- acgourley 16y agoUntil high profile people write public complaints that hit #1 on hacker news.
- rfolstad 16y agoGmail contacts sync with mobile phones like the G1 which don't have tons of memory or processor power. Try using one of those phone with 9000+ contacts and its not a nice experience. The limitation is there for performance reasons. Besides why is your sales guy is using gmail as his crm?
- nanoanderson 16y agoThis is the type of support response which is accepted by companies as "good enough," because it recognizes that there is a problem and offers a "solution." Really, this is one of those non-apology apologies that is infuriating to people with completely reasonable expectations. What is this nonsense of asking the user to formally request a feature? They just did request a feature! If it needs to go into a system, the support person should do that for them. A better approach: actually apologize, give your explanation (or excuse), give a timeline for a solution if possible. Abbreviated example for this situation: "Very sorry, we understand why this has caused confusion and problems… We set arbitrary limits to prevent outright abuse, and made a mistake by not having a function to override in special cases such as yours… I've forwarded your issue to our engineering dept., and I will personally inform you when we've solved your problem." Is that really so hard?
- bdonlan 16y agoI would suspect the real reason is something along the lines of "We download the entire contact list in JS in the client to do autocompletion, so if it gets too big your browser runs out of memory and crashes." They might also be storing the contacts database as a single row in their backend store. Either way it's not necessarily as easy as a quick change in an upper limit, and the number of users affected is likely to be quite small, so I wouldn't be surprised if this wasn't exactly at the top of their priorities.
- ryanwaggoner 16y ago$10 says that the support guy has no idea why it's not easy (or whether it's easy), which is why he gave a completely generic non-answer. And even if it isn't a top priority, the support guy should definitely put it into the system as a feature request, ideally with a link to the issue so the customer knows it was entered. This might as well have been an automated email: Dear <customer>, Unfortunately, we don't allow <feature requested>. If you'd like to see us do <feature requested> in the future, please follow these instructions to request it...
- 16y ago
- ghc 16y agoIt bothers the computer scientist in me that they set an artificial number as a contact limit. 2^16? Okay, they made a design decision that is problematic. But 10000? Obviously someone set an arbitrary limit based on their expert opinion about the number of contacts a person might need. I am shocked that the "expert" was wrong.
- jimmyk 16y agoI would consider a design problem like that a bit worse than an arbitrary limit, from both the perspective that the artificial limit demonstrates someone considered that edge case and the perspective that the arbitrary limit will probably be easier to change in the future. If they're storing the contacts in a way that they're bumping up against some real constraint, it could be far more difficult to change it.
- endtime 16y agoThe question of whether stupidity is worse than malice is one for the ages.
- ghc 16y agoA design problem could be motivated by the need to save space (and even 2 bytes per row would save google a lot of database space). Even google doesn't have infinite storage, and there's always going to be a real limit somewhere.
- jauco 16y agoOr they did set a minimal speed target and are able to reach that target using the current systems/algorithms as long as everyone keeps their database under 10,000 contacts. 10,001 probably would work, but the programmers verified and are able to _guarantee_ the agreed speed with 10,000
- patrickaljord 16y ago> Obviously someone set an arbitrary limit based on their expert Google is known to based their decisions on actual data, they probably noticed that most people were below eg 500 contacts and 99.9% below 9000 (or such) and decided that 10000 would be safe.
- pcolton 16y agoAlternatively, you can create a second gmail account to 'archive' your least used contacts, and your primary account for your most used. I do this for archived email as well, for example.
- edw519 16y ago1971: Dear user, You cannot have more than 10,000 records. If we increased the maximum in the data base schema, we'd have to modify half of our software. Sorry, IT. 1981: Dear user, You cannot have more than 10,000 records. Our software vendor set this limit and we don't have the source code. Sorry, IT. 1991: Dear user, You cannot have more than 10,000 records. We don't have enough room in our budget for more hard disk. Sorry, IT. 2001: Dear user, You cannot have more than 10,000 records. Our network traffic is so high that we had to set arbitrary limits. Sorry, IT. 2011: Dear user, You cannot have more than 10,000 records. The internet is full. Sorry, Google. [EDIT: Replaced "contacts" with "records" 5 times. The general case causes less confusion. Thank you, juiceandjuice.]
- juiceandjuice 16y agoBefore 1991, it would have probably been "A Rolodex can only hold 10,000 cards" for most people. The solution would be to buy another Rolodex.
- valjavec 16y agoTrue, but hackers are smart people and don't like dumb rules. In real physical rolodex you can understand the limit, because it really exists. In Gmail it's hardcoded "OK <= 10000" and that's hard to understand, specially when there's upgrade for 20,000 contacts - so 10,000 is just an artificial dumb rule.
- mvalle 16y agoI fear that 1981 still applies today, and is indeed the case with Google.
- Semiapies 16y agoI bet Google actually has access to its own code for Apps contacts.
- Florin_Andrei 16y ago
- nomad_man 16y agoSo, are you a paying customer? This seems very unthoughtful of them. Actually i was considering evaluating them for enterprise use, looks like i will have to postpone the evaluation.
- tlack 16y agoIt does seem to have a lot of weird artificial limits around the edge that no amount of begging or paying will ever change. I know people are saying stuff like this doesn't matter, but I manage at least 15 domains on GDomains now, and I will probably hesitate a bit before adding another. Can I trust Google Domains to grow as my business does? I can't believe you can't pay for more space..
- catch23 16y agoI guess you'll have to find a new place for email when your business grows beyond 10,000 employees... When you have 10,000 employees, you could probably just get a team to author their own version of gmail.
- tlack 16y agoAre you talking about the limits in the linked article? It's 10,000 contacts in the address book that are limited, not total employees - though that is probably limited too.
- spaznode 16y agoOmgwtf? So yeah, wow they finally found someone who hit the 10000 limit solution. Maybe they'll make the 10k browser limit turn into a more dynamic/pageable solution and maybe they won't. Choosing to solve browser issue with 10k at the time was probably the right engineering answer to the problem at hand. The solution is complicated and time consuming and time for engineers costs money. So yeah, just use another enterprise app instead. You don't really have much choice.
- Duff 16y agoThis is for individual contacts, not the email directory. Google has several customers with >10,000 accounts.
- jsdalton 16y agoFWIW, Highrise also sets seemingly "arbitrary" limits to the number of contacts you can have in an account: http://highrisehq.com/signup http://highrisehq.com/signup I guess both Google and 37signals do it because it's just a quick and dirty way to manage resources. There maybe be other reasons that we're not aware of though (e.g. people using more than that number of contacts might frequently be using the app for nefarious purposes?). It's a shame because limitations like these ultimately place limits on your creativity. In the case of Highrise for example, I once had an idea to use it to manage and track communications for all of my applications users, but obviously that doesn't work if there are hard limits there. Not sure I have a moral to my little story, except that arbitrary limits are understandable, but frustrating and unfortunate.
- dasil003 16y agoCreativity comes from limits.
- beaumartinez 16y ago"Necessity is the mother of invention."
- jsdalton 16y agoThat's a rather facile response. Is that what Google should say to the guy who is complaining in the article? "Oh, you need more than 10,000 contacts? Well, why don't you just find a creative solution to the problem instead. Creativity comes from limits!" Trust me, I'm sure this guy will find a creative solution to his problem, just as I ended up finding a creative solution to my own problem. But I'd be extremely wary as a developer of presuming to know more about your customer's problem space than they do, and that all they need is a little dash of creative thinking to get around whatever limitation your software may have presented them with.
- dasil003 16y agoI apologize for being so oblique, but I wasn't responding to the article, merely the line: > It's a shame because limitations like these ultimately place limits on your creativity. I understand what you mean, but this statement still bothers me. Needing more than 10,000 contacts may be a requirement for many reasons, but creativity does not seem like one of them to me.
- foljs 16y ago"""Dear Google, I Have More Than 10,000 Contacts""" Then you are a hoarder, and you collect stuff to avoid thinking of DEATH. (Psychology hacker)
- johnrob 16y agoThis is where the 37 signals folks would politely say no. You can't please every user, and something tells me that a majority of gmail users aren't sporting a 10k contact list.
- Groxx 16y agoThe majority of Gmail users aren't paying users either, nor are they paying for a business account. For the free / non-business accounts, yes, by all means, put in an arbitrary limit. But that's actually pretty low for a business - what if they have > 10k employees, much less external contacts?
- tonfa 16y agoAs far as I know, for business using google apps, if you have 10k employees you don't need to have 10k contacts, I think there is some kind of ldap integration. Edit: See http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1092941 http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ... I don't think user profiles (that would be what is used for employees inside an organization) and shared contacts have a 10k limitation, only the user personal contacts have it.
- eitally 16y agoDomain contacts (fed by a GAL sync in addition to domain-level groups created via cpanel) are not counted toward the limit.
- sigzero 16y agoAny company with that many employees is not going to be using Gmail in the first place.
- jbrechtel 16y agoWhy do you say that? We have about 2-3k and use Google Apps and it's a great fit. Just curious what you think would make it not a good fit if/when we start to approach 10k?
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- mgrouchy 16y agoIs this actually a problem for more people then this guy? I literally don't know anyone who has 10000 contacts, I also don't know anyone who actually needs 10000 contacts.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- mgrouchy 16y agoI imagine that if you have 50K employee's and you are paying google ~50$/account/yr(2.5M/yr) (im sure if you had 50k employees you would work a deal out with google), you could work a deal to get the contact list thing straightened out. 1 User who says they are willing to pay is significantly different then a company who is paying for 50k employees.
- tonfa 16y agoGoogle apps already autocompletes on the employee list: http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1092941 http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ... The personal contacts is another thing. So having 10k or more employees isn't a problem for google apps, what is a problem is employees who have more than 10k personal contacts (not very common).
- albertzeyer 16y agoYou could also just keep track of about everyone you ever talked to. Just keep the contact in some database with some notes/references about him. Always better to just loose/delete the contact.
- zach 16y agoSome people have jobs which have them make five to ten new business contacts in an average workday. No, they're not becoming best friends or anything, they're just exchanging business cards. Still, that's only five to ten years of that kind of work. The thing is that people don't know ahead of time which contacts they need. They just put everyone they meet in their contacts. Then if someone says, "Hey, do you know so-and-so?" they can actually email or call that person right away.
- strmpnk 16y agoI call hoarding. I hope he isn't trying to actually mail 10k people from his gmail account. Use a real ESP or CRM tool if you need that volume.
- salemh 16y agoRefer to the original article stating the auto-adding by Google of emails Into contacts. As well as (for other comments above) that an employee of Google (not the main articles more..generic support response ticket email) is "working on a solution."
- fjabre 16y agoI ran into this issue as well. A lot of Googlers read this board.. Any one of them care to chime in? EDIT: It's worth noting that loading near the 10k limit into your Google Contacts kills your browser. The current UI setup is probably one of the issues with having over 10k contacts.
- peterwwillis 16y agoDo you actually contact 10,000 people in a way that's not spam? The answer is obviously No. Nobody talks to 10,000 people. What are you gonna do, spend five weeks calling the first 4,000 people? Send 2,500 text messages? CC 8,000 users on your annual Christmas Greeting e-mail? How the hell would you even begin to sort through that many contacts using a cell phone or a standard e-mail client? It's Google. This company serves the general public and doesn't have the resources to tailor its service to every asshole (or Executive) with unrealistic expectations. Next time somebody asks for more than 10,000 contacts they should just flip him the bird.
- ChuckMcM 16y agoCongressional respresentatives can easily have more than 10,000 'contacts.' It would be interesting to see if Microsoft's Exchange server can handle more than 10,000. Active Directory certainly can. So perhaps it would be a competitive feature. For this community however I would agree there is always a tension between the 80 - 90% solution and the outliers. If you have more business than you can handle, supporting outliers seems like a waste of resources, the problem comes when someone decides to support those outliers and builds a system that can handle your customer base as well. That gives them the high ground competitively. From Google's perspective I suspect its not like they get enough revenue from this whole Apps business to make it worth their while, it seems to be more of a way to poke MS than a product. (But disclaimer time I use Google's app)
- run4yourlives 16y agoDear User: You are an exception that it would cost more to support than not to. Sorry, find something else.
- kqueue 16y agoYet another loud and obnoxious user.
- Duff 16y agoIMO, this is an area where 37signals has the right approach. I run into things like this when we consolidate email systems. Its always a battle. Weird corner cases like the guy who has 50,000 folders in his inbox, cross referenced with multiple copies of messages in folders. Then you have the guy with 75,000 objects in his Inbox. Or the one with 120 GB of email dating back 20 (!) years who must have all mail on an online mailbox and cannot use archiving. At the end of the day, supporting the bizarro corner cases can impact your ability to support the other 99% of the users. To make it worse, in most cases, you are just on the receiving end of a power trip or attention whoring episode anyway. So, if these people are peons, you tell them to piss off. If they are bigshots, you waste money dealing with their whims.
- haploid 16y agoI'm not even sure if I believe this. 10k works out to be 40 new contacts per business day( 5 days per week, 52 weeks minus 2 for vacation ) for a year. Let's assume this guy has been "at it" for 4 years. That's still 10 new contacts every day. Nobody who has actual work to do is going to contact, establish rapport, communicate enough to know the contact would be valuable, and then most importantly, maintain the relationship with 10 NEW people every single working day for 4 years straight.
- kleinsch 16y agoI love how many of comments on this article have no idea who Brad Feld is, and nobody bothered to read his bio before deciding he's a spammer. He's one of the more famous tech entrepreneurs and investors. He's had companies acquired, sits on the board of a bunch of big companies, and runs TechStars. Networking is his job, and he's been doing it for over 20 years. If he wanted to run a spam newsletter (which he has no reason to do), he has the resources to use something way better than Gmail. ;)
- haploid 16y agoThanks for pointing this out. I've removed the spam claim. I still stand by the research that makes it evident human beings can't maintain relationships with more than a couple hundred people at a time, and I doubt very much that Feld( or any other human being )is capable of even remembering a small fraction of the people on that list.
- Semiapies 16y ago"Famous" is a relative thing. You're the first person in a 75+ comment thread to admit to knowing who he is.
- erikpukinskis 16y agoI know who he is. But whether he's famous is immaterial. You all are assuming that just because you can't imagine jobs that would require you to maintain a database of 10k contacts that there are none.
- jsavimbi 16y agoMaybe what Mr. Feld should've said is "First!" and yes, then moved on to another solution, but they're paying $50/yr/user so I can see how a common sense approach would probably solve this for the limited number of +10K contact-having users. That being said, I'm probably one of those 10K contacts and say what you will, Brad has always responded to email and been a helpful resource to myself and the community without asking for anything in exchange. Not exactly a contact whore. Or a lightweight.
- deltaqueue 16y agoI believe someone already mentioned it, but Gmail used to (by default) add all people you communicated with to your contact list. I didn't start using my Gmail contacts list effectively until 2010 (when I got Android), so I ended up cleaning out something like 6k contacts I accumulated over the past 5 years. This guy doesn't need 10k contacts--he just doesn't want to go through and remove the non-essentials.
- drm237 16y agoA classic Rolodex holds about 400 cards. So he's at 25 Rolodexes. That would be a sight to see sitting on a desk!
- Semiapies 16y agoSo, an annoyed blog entry by the sort of petulant user who bitches to his IT guy when a web-application run by another company says "You're over your limit." No indication that they're paying for anything, just whining about the limits of a free contact system. ETA: Fair enough, he does have some sort of enterprise support. Mind you, this post sure has a lot of search-baiting links (like every single instance of the string "Google Apps", even in quoted blocks) pointed at other blog entries. Dude, enjoy your 10K contact limit and your plummeting search ranking.
- duck 16y agoAt a certain point you need to have something more than Gmail to handle that many contacts, like a CRM type application.
- clintboxe 16y agoSounds like a humble brag to me.
- jschuur 16y agoThe 37 Signals answer is a good immediate reaction, but there is some due diligence that Google can do here, that can be used for longer term product development, as well as a sanity check of the current state of their product: * Review the original intent with the 10,000 limitation. Was it a precautionary measure that turned out to either be justified or incorrect? Was it a technical limitation that has since gone away with DB, browser or bandwidth improvements? * Ask the customer about their usage patterns. Can they be served with an alternate, existing product (LDAP, mailing lists, Google Docs spreadsheets)? * Run some stats on a sample user base and project what percentage of other users will hit this limit at what point. * Is there an opportunity to develop a new product, not for this user in particular, but something that uses contacts in a different way for those users who have a legitimate need for this many 'contacts' (large mailing list support within Gmail)? * Start logging the number of users with this complaint internally, so that demand can be measured even if the user doesn't file a feature request. Regardless of whether you personally think someone can maintain 10,000 relationships (they certainly can't), you can always learn from the unexpected ways other people use your product, and figure out a way to either improve it or create a separate product that can interact with it.
- harryf 16y agoWonder whether the Google Apps has it's own profit and loss as the bottom line? The response is suggestive of Google Apps team being funded by ad revenue and not really having to care too much winning and keeping it's own customers. Can anyone shed insight?
- zdw 16y ago"Dear Google, I need a CRM System"
- est 16y agoDear Google, I stared more than 60 projects on Google Code.
- erikpukinskis 16y agoIt's funny that everyone on this thread is like "No one needs more then 10,000 contacts! Spammer!" when Highrise's medium-sized acccount has 20k. Their big account has 30k. Only their intro plan has less than 10k. http://highrisehq.com/signup http://highrisehq.com/signup
- savoy11 16y agoBecause you my friend are an annoying prick. I bet $100 that you are also the guy who always finds problems in restaurants and hotels and thinks something is wrong there. This type of attitude is typical of annoying guys like yourself. You do not have 10,00 friends. In fact, you probably do not even have 10 friends. Just shut the fuck up.
- URSpider94 16y agoI'm really surprised at how many people are jumping to discredit the poster's legitimate need for more than 10k contacts. This is toxic thinking for a technical entrepreneur, to assume that any use case outside your original design is either pathological or caused by user error. Smart developers crave this kind of feedback, so that they can figure out where their assumptions about user behavior are wrong and work to correct them.