6 ms·

That's mainly media. What's the deal with deleting emails of all things, as if they couldn't support that aspect indefinitely?

hanniabu 6y ago
People use email as a sneaky method of storage
- perryizgr8 6y ago
  Sometimes it's the most practical way to share photos and documents, especially when iphones are involved.
  - rblatz 6y ago
    We just use shared albums or text them to each other.
- fps_doug 6y ago
  How prevalent is that? Some nerds doing this is a drop in the ocean. Rather my bet would be on Youtube as the hungry beast that can't get enough storage. There's a loooooooot of videos that have single digit views yet need to be accessible at any time, instantly. Video is large. Doesn't youtube even keep the original file nowadays?
  - blackboxlogic 6y ago
    Sounds like we need a way to encode arbitrary data into video that can survive lossy compression. Youtube filesystem?
  - basscomm 6y ago
    In my experience, this is super common. Lots of average computer users send video clips, uncompressed 48 megapixel photos from their cell phones, PowerPoint presentations with embedded videos and 48 megapixel images, pdfs, and on and on. At the company where I work now several people have a 1MB gif of the company logo that they put in their signature. Combine that with Gmail telling users for years that they had plenty of space, so there was no need to ever delete anything, and people believed it. Now you have a decade of emails with giant attachments or embeds that may or may not ever get looked at, and that keeps growing.
    - pokot0 6y ago
      Deduplication solves that problem. There is only one (or very few) instance(s) of that gif on Google servers. That's why encryption will not be available anytime soon. Storage requirement would explode.
      - xeyownt 6y ago
        You can do deduplication and encryption. The harder part is how to make it paranoid-level-privacy-friendly.
- fowl2 6y ago
  it would be nice if they allowed deletion (or even dedupe!) of attachments
mikem170 6y ago
Right! Maybe they are cutting email because it is not as profitable. I agree with the other poster who brought up storage costs not keeping up with growth of stuff to store. I wonder what this means for youtube...
- free2OSS 6y ago
  Email is the tightest grip Google has on me. Maybe YouTube. But their Google music fail, their rising phone prices, their bait and switch photo storage, and low quality search results have caused me to change. Any alternatives to Chrome, Firefox on both Android and Desktop are buggy, I want a different company?
  - int_19h 6y ago
    If you're okay with Blink under the hood, take a look at Vivaldi. It's made by some of the same people who did the original Opera, and is very much in the same spirit - instead of the modern trend of bare-bones browser + third-party extensions, it comes with "batteries included".
    - kmonsen 6y ago
      +1 for Vivaldi. I can promise you the people behind it just want to make a great browser.
      - square_usual 6y ago
        I tried Vivaldi for a long time, but a couple of things drew me back to Firefox eventually. The biggest problem was that it kept signing me out of Google for some reason. I've seen threads about this elsewhere, so I'm not the only person facing it. Then, the containers feature in Firefox was very useful as I have multiple "identities" in different spaces, so I could isolate them in their own containers to prevent spillover.
    - _hyn3 6y ago
      Sadly, Vivaldi was sold a few years ago and no longer seems the ideal choice if you're focused on privacy and security. https://www.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/iq33nv/brave_vs_vivaldi_in_2020/ https://www.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/iq33nv/brave... When it was launched a year or two ago, Brave didn't integrate with the Chrome extension web store, but now it does (just like Vivaldi). Of course, also like Vivaldi, you may not need another adblocker since Brave has "shields" which are very easy to enable/disable (but it works fine if you install ublock origin, privacy badger, quick JS switcher, etc.)

hanniabu 6y ago

People use email as a sneaky method of storage

perryizgr8 6y ago
Sometimes it's the most practical way to share photos and documents, especially when iphones are involved.
- rblatz 6y ago
  We just use shared albums or text them to each other.
fps_doug 6y ago
How prevalent is that? Some nerds doing this is a drop in the ocean. Rather my bet would be on Youtube as the hungry beast that can't get enough storage. There's a loooooooot of videos that have single digit views yet need to be accessible at any time, instantly. Video is large. Doesn't youtube even keep the original file nowadays?
- blackboxlogic 6y ago
  Sounds like we need a way to encode arbitrary data into video that can survive lossy compression. Youtube filesystem?
- basscomm 6y ago
  In my experience, this is super common. Lots of average computer users send video clips, uncompressed 48 megapixel photos from their cell phones, PowerPoint presentations with embedded videos and 48 megapixel images, pdfs, and on and on. At the company where I work now several people have a 1MB gif of the company logo that they put in their signature. Combine that with Gmail telling users for years that they had plenty of space, so there was no need to ever delete anything, and people believed it. Now you have a decade of emails with giant attachments or embeds that may or may not ever get looked at, and that keeps growing.
  - pokot0 6y ago
    Deduplication solves that problem. There is only one (or very few) instance(s) of that gif on Google servers. That's why encryption will not be available anytime soon. Storage requirement would explode.
    - xeyownt 6y ago
      You can do deduplication and encryption. The harder part is how to make it paranoid-level-privacy-friendly.
fowl2 6y ago
it would be nice if they allowed deletion (or even dedupe!) of attachments

mikem170 6y ago

Right! Maybe they are cutting email because it is not as profitable. I agree with the other poster who brought up storage costs not keeping up with growth of stuff to store. I wonder what this means for youtube...

free2OSS 6y ago
Email is the tightest grip Google has on me. Maybe YouTube. But their Google music fail, their rising phone prices, their bait and switch photo storage, and low quality search results have caused me to change. Any alternatives to Chrome, Firefox on both Android and Desktop are buggy, I want a different company?
- int_19h 6y ago
  If you're okay with Blink under the hood, take a look at Vivaldi. It's made by some of the same people who did the original Opera, and is very much in the same spirit - instead of the modern trend of bare-bones browser + third-party extensions, it comes with "batteries included".
  - kmonsen 6y ago
    +1 for Vivaldi. I can promise you the people behind it just want to make a great browser.
    - square_usual 6y ago
      I tried Vivaldi for a long time, but a couple of things drew me back to Firefox eventually. The biggest problem was that it kept signing me out of Google for some reason. I've seen threads about this elsewhere, so I'm not the only person facing it. Then, the containers feature in Firefox was very useful as I have multiple "identities" in different spaces, so I could isolate them in their own containers to prevent spillover.
  - _hyn3 6y ago
    Sadly, Vivaldi was sold a few years ago and no longer seems the ideal choice if you're focused on privacy and security. https://www.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/iq33nv/brave_vs_vivaldi_in_2020/ https://www.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/iq33nv/brave... When it was launched a year or two ago, Brave didn't integrate with the Chrome extension web store, but now it does (just like Vivaldi). Of course, also like Vivaldi, you may not need another adblocker since Brave has "shields" which are very easy to enable/disable (but it works fine if you install ublock origin, privacy badger, quick JS switcher, etc.)