6 ms·

Bill Gates Flabbergasted By Gmail

118 points by jkuria 15y ago

staunch 15y ago
Adding "2MB email ought to be enough for anybody" to the list of things Bill Gates might have said.
- mdda 15y ago
  But somewhere in the design of Outlook was an implicit 2Gb limit : The max size of a PST file. Maybe it was an OS limit, but still the decision to store all email in a single binary blob wasn't sufficiently forward-thinking.
  - gaius 15y ago
    I suspect that means a .PST is mmap()'d (or Windows equivalent), 32-bit Windows gives each process a 2G address space by default.
    - kragen 15y ago
      If that were the problem, the limit would be substantially less than 2G because of the address space needed for the DLLs, the stack, other allocated memory, and so on; and, of course, the space consumed by address space fragmentation.
josephcooney 15y ago
Bullshit. The conclusions the author draws, that Gates was "anchored in the old paradigm of storage being a commodity that must be conserved" sounds like typical hand-wavy details-don't-matter business-person think. Microsoft is notorious for generating tons of internal e-mail. People go away on holidays and come back to 10K unread emails. More likely Bill knows how much e-mail he receives and roughly how much it grows per week/month. This guy tells him that he's burned through 1GB of e-mail in few months and that just doesn't add up to Bill. Either this reporter receives an order-of-magnitude more e-mails than Bill does or people have 1MB pictures in their signature blocks or something. So Bill starts drilling down and asking questions. Remember Bill is a fairly 'technical' guy (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html) 'He began firing questions. "How many messages are there?" he demanded. "Seriously, I'm trying to understand whether it's the number of messages or the size of messages." ' I don't interpret this to be gates questioning the necessity for more than 1GB of e-mail, just trying to get to the bottom of how this guy managed to use that much in a few months.
- jamesbkel 15y ago
  Agreed. I definitely have more than 1GB of email, but asking one would need/use that amount of storage is a perfectly legit question.
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    Because, according to the old paradigm, part of using email systems was the chore of deleting old messages. Much like it's perfectly natural to a lot of people to find a company's website, download a setup program and run it instead of running a package manager.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - nirvdrum 15y ago
      Maybe it's just me, but I still have to delete messages. Otherwise a bunch of crap I no longer care about gets returned in GMail's search, completely defeating the purpose of having a search-driven interface.
      - FaceKicker 15y ago
        I find I'm unable to determine whether a message is crap I'll never care about again or not. Often I can't think of a reason I'd possibly ever use a message again, and lo and behold there's some strange reason I want to refer back to it 2 years later (e.g., figuring out my start date for an old job on a new application ... weird little cases like that).
        nirvdrum 15y ago
        I guess just about everything Google will classify as "bulk" I'll never need again. The Groupon deal that expired yesterday isn't something I'm going to need to access 2 years from now. Maybe those monit alerts I will, but in all likelihood not. Things like that. But they usually end up having just enough terms to throw off GMail's already terrible search making it hard to find content I really care about.
jc123 15y ago
Gates was right in "What've you got in there? Movies? PowerPoint presentations?" A variant of the 80/20 rule probably applies to email: 80% of the size of your inbox is caused by the 20% largest emails.
- Jabbles 15y ago
  True, although it would be hard not to have such a rule: where something is shared among a sufficiently large set of participants, there must be a number k between 50 and 100 such that "k% is taken by (100 − k)% of the participants http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
  - esrauch 15y ago
    Yeah, that is pretty obvious. No one would bother saying that 55% of the space is taken by 45% of the email though. It is mentioned because of high difference between the two values.
    - kragen 15y ago
      I think that would be worth pointing out, because it's such a huge deviation from the quasi-Zipfian behavior you'd expect.
  - jamesbritt 15y ago
    There's no reason those numbers need to sum to 100. E.g. 90% of X could be contolled by 30% of the people using X.
    - Troll_Whisperer 15y ago
      If it's a continuous function, they need to sum at some point. A lot of real world things are close enough to continuous for all practical purposes, though I'll concede that we aren't actually sending and receiving email infinitesimals.
robryan 15y ago
I think the number would seem like a plus to most even though they will never get anywhere near needing it. Just knowing that your never going to hit a space barrier while archiving all your emails is a big thing.
CrLf 15y ago
"anchored in the old paradigm of storage being a commodity that must be conserved" Yeah, such an old paradigm... Just try managing backups for an ever increasing mail store... Yes, today storage is cheap (even middle-tier storage arrays where the cost per-GB is about 20x of consumer-level disks can be considered cheap), but keeping large volumes of data safe from disaster is not "cheap". Just ask Google how much time it took them to restore those Gmail mailboxes from tape after they got lost in production a few months back. And that's google we're talking about...
peng 15y ago
There's a certain irony in this thread sharing the front page with “We ran out of disk space” (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2747152 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2747152)
mike-cardwell 15y ago
Just some figures that might interest. Current storage offered in a gmail account: 7,602MB Current maximum size of an email for gmail: 35MB So you could technically fill a gmail account with 217 emails. However, looking at my mail backups, I've received approximately 17,000 emails so far this year. The average size of an email was 6.6KB. Altogether, they're using up just over 100MB of disk space. My live mail has only 15 of those 17,000 emails remaining in it, using up 300KB of disk.
- sabon 15y ago
  It seems like maximum size for an email is 25 MB. "With Gmail, you can send and receive messages up to 25 megabytes (MB) in size." http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=8770 http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=8770
  - mike-cardwell 15y ago
    I got the 35MB by connecting to their MX and then looking at the value returned by the SIZE ESMTP extension: mike@alfa:~$ telnet gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com 25 Trying 209.85.143.27... Connected to gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com. Escape character is '^]'. 220 mx.google.com ESMTP z4si16632304weq.140 EHLO mail.cardwellit.com 250-mx.google.com at your service, [178.79.145.246] 250-SIZE 35882577 250-8BITMIME 250-STARTTLS 250 ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES Their MX states that it accepts messages up to 35882577 bytes in size, which is just under 35MB.
    - ianterrell 15y ago
      That's a great bit of technical expectation management. "We'll accept up to 25MB!" And then when you send something 26 or 27MB because you don't notice that it's so close to the limit, the system forgives you.
      - gvb 15y ago
        More likely it is an accommodation of base64[1] (MIME) encoding of binary files, which results in a 30% expansion (3 bytes get encoded to 4): 25MB * (4/3) = 33MB. People who read that GMail is limited to 25MB will expect their 25MB photo to be accepted. This requires the absolute size limit to be set to 33MB (probably bumped up to 35MB to accommodate the HTML body and other spurious stuff like the 25 off-topic replies). [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64
latch 15y ago
The saddest thing about this, for me, is that I work for a company where everyone (including myself) gets over their mailbox limit in a couple days...7 years.../cry
sung1 15y ago
Yeah well what I'm interested in is: what are we believing in right now that will sound just as ridiculous five years from now on?
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
loboman 15y ago
Bill Gates' question made some sense. If mails are 3k each, and you have 1 GB of space, how many mails do you need to receive per day to get out of space in 6 months? http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%281+gigabyte+%2F+3kilobyte%29+%2F+6+months http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%281+gigabyte+%2F+3kilo... the answer is 1826 mails per day. I assume what happened here is that they didn't have good stats of the mail sizes in the conversation and Bill tried to estimate something like this and as a result, he thought it was ridiculous.
- cracki 15y ago
  3k is a bit small... consider, those are newspaper people. they send HTML emails, PDFs, scans, photos, all that stuff. wouldn't surprise me if they collected a few megs a day. busy people.
  - sesqu 15y ago
    Version control over e-mail would hit that 7MB/day limit easily, when dealing with image formats. Makes sense.
  - derleth 15y ago
    > 3k is a bit small... And Gates explicitly asked how big each email was, on average.
- hussong 15y ago
  Maybe they email a lot with the kind of people who embed their fancy company logo as a 50K jpg into their mails, then you're down to 100 mails per day.
Deestan 15y ago
> "anchored in the old paradigm of storage being a commodity that must be conserved" The author seems to think that Google's innovation was to simply ignore the storage problem and then it went away. What they did was work immensely hard at the storage problem, until their innovations in data compression and retrieval made it possible to store larger amounts of data. http://highscalability.com/google-architecture http://highscalability.com/google-architecture
libria 15y ago
For what computers cost in 1980 compared to their utility, I'm not sure why an average household would get one.
- pnathan 15y ago
  An astute observation. I believe it took spreadsheets for 'personal' computers to really start taking off in the smaller business world; it wasn't until - IIRC - Windows 95 that computers took off in households. I remember that you were something special prior to '95 or so if you owned a computer.
ImprovedSilence 15y ago
I'm on a mobile phone right now, and I have to say, that was the most poorly laid out and convolouted site I've seen on a phone......
tdignan 15y ago
It's a shame that we give attention whoring journalists like this guy any attention at all. More sensational bs. If I wanted sensationalist, I'd be on reddit's /r/politics.
georgieporgie 15y ago
Only a few months after starting this, both of us had consumed more than half of Gmail's 2-gigabyte free storage space. Okay, I'm extremely suspicious of anyone who claims to process one gigabyte of email per month. Barring large attachments, that is a tremendous amount of sheer data. If you're getting that much email, you probably need culling tools more than you need space. Regarding the two gigabyte limit being shocking, it was at the time. The only reason Google could pull it off is because 1) very, very few users would get anywhere near that and 2) they were already scaling data at a ridiculous rate. A traditionally desktop-oriented software company like Microsoft would not be able to offer anything similar without tremendous investment of hardware and development.
nohat 15y ago
1GB over a few months? In text? That's ~500000 pages of text. I doubt that the reporters actually received that much email. There's probably something else draining space that they didn't realize (hence Gate's surprise).
ern 15y ago
If this was 2004, how did the author have 2GB of storage on Gmail and use "more than half", when it launched with 1 GB and was only upgraded to 2GB in 2005? ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail )

118 points by jkuria 15y ago

staunch 15y ago

Adding "2MB email ought to be enough for anybody" to the list of things Bill Gates might have said.

mdda 15y ago
But somewhere in the design of Outlook was an implicit 2Gb limit : The max size of a PST file. Maybe it was an OS limit, but still the decision to store all email in a single binary blob wasn't sufficiently forward-thinking.
- gaius 15y ago
  I suspect that means a .PST is mmap()'d (or Windows equivalent), 32-bit Windows gives each process a 2G address space by default.
  - kragen 15y ago
    If that were the problem, the limit would be substantially less than 2G because of the address space needed for the DLLs, the stack, other allocated memory, and so on; and, of course, the space consumed by address space fragmentation.

josephcooney 15y ago

Bullshit. The conclusions the author draws, that Gates was "anchored in the old paradigm of storage being a commodity that must be conserved" sounds like typical hand-wavy details-don't-matter business-person think. Microsoft is notorious for generating tons of internal e-mail. People go away on holidays and come back to 10K unread emails. More likely Bill knows how much e-mail he receives and roughly how much it grows per week/month. This guy tells him that he's burned through 1GB of e-mail in few months and that just doesn't add up to Bill. Either this reporter receives an order-of-magnitude more e-mails than Bill does or people have 1MB pictures in their signature blocks or something. So Bill starts drilling down and asking questions. Remember Bill is a fairly 'technical' guy (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html) 'He began firing questions. "How many messages are there?" he demanded. "Seriously, I'm trying to understand whether it's the number of messages or the size of messages." ' I don't interpret this to be gates questioning the necessity for more than 1GB of e-mail, just trying to get to the bottom of how this guy managed to use that much in a few months.

jamesbkel 15y ago
Agreed. I definitely have more than 1GB of email, but asking one would need/use that amount of storage is a perfectly legit question.
- rbanffy 15y ago
  Because, according to the old paradigm, part of using email systems was the chore of deleting old messages. Much like it's perfectly natural to a lot of people to find a company's website, download a setup program and run it instead of running a package manager.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - nirvdrum 15y ago
    Maybe it's just me, but I still have to delete messages. Otherwise a bunch of crap I no longer care about gets returned in GMail's search, completely defeating the purpose of having a search-driven interface.
    - FaceKicker 15y ago
      I find I'm unable to determine whether a message is crap I'll never care about again or not. Often I can't think of a reason I'd possibly ever use a message again, and lo and behold there's some strange reason I want to refer back to it 2 years later (e.g., figuring out my start date for an old job on a new application ... weird little cases like that).
      - nirvdrum 15y ago
        I guess just about everything Google will classify as "bulk" I'll never need again. The Groupon deal that expired yesterday isn't something I'm going to need to access 2 years from now. Maybe those monit alerts I will, but in all likelihood not. Things like that. But they usually end up having just enough terms to throw off GMail's already terrible search making it hard to find content I really care about.

jc123 15y ago

Gates was right in "What've you got in there? Movies? PowerPoint presentations?" A variant of the 80/20 rule probably applies to email: 80% of the size of your inbox is caused by the 20% largest emails.

Jabbles 15y ago
True, although it would be hard not to have such a rule: where something is shared among a sufficiently large set of participants, there must be a number k between 50 and 100 such that "k% is taken by (100 − k)% of the participants http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
- esrauch 15y ago
  Yeah, that is pretty obvious. No one would bother saying that 55% of the space is taken by 45% of the email though. It is mentioned because of high difference between the two values.
  - kragen 15y ago
    I think that would be worth pointing out, because it's such a huge deviation from the quasi-Zipfian behavior you'd expect.
- jamesbritt 15y ago
  There's no reason those numbers need to sum to 100. E.g. 90% of X could be contolled by 30% of the people using X.
  - Troll_Whisperer 15y ago
    If it's a continuous function, they need to sum at some point. A lot of real world things are close enough to continuous for all practical purposes, though I'll concede that we aren't actually sending and receiving email infinitesimals.

robryan 15y ago

I think the number would seem like a plus to most even though they will never get anywhere near needing it. Just knowing that your never going to hit a space barrier while archiving all your emails is a big thing.

CrLf 15y ago

"anchored in the old paradigm of storage being a commodity that must be conserved" Yeah, such an old paradigm... Just try managing backups for an ever increasing mail store... Yes, today storage is cheap (even middle-tier storage arrays where the cost per-GB is about 20x of consumer-level disks can be considered cheap), but keeping large volumes of data safe from disaster is not "cheap". Just ask Google how much time it took them to restore those Gmail mailboxes from tape after they got lost in production a few months back. And that's google we're talking about...

peng 15y ago

There's a certain irony in this thread sharing the front page with “We ran out of disk space” (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2747152 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2747152)

mike-cardwell 15y ago

Just some figures that might interest. Current storage offered in a gmail account: 7,602MB Current maximum size of an email for gmail: 35MB So you could technically fill a gmail account with 217 emails. However, looking at my mail backups, I've received approximately 17,000 emails so far this year. The average size of an email was 6.6KB. Altogether, they're using up just over 100MB of disk space. My live mail has only 15 of those 17,000 emails remaining in it, using up 300KB of disk.

sabon 15y ago
It seems like maximum size for an email is 25 MB. "With Gmail, you can send and receive messages up to 25 megabytes (MB) in size." http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=8770 http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=8770
- mike-cardwell 15y ago
  I got the 35MB by connecting to their MX and then looking at the value returned by the SIZE ESMTP extension: mike@alfa:~$ telnet gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com 25 Trying 209.85.143.27... Connected to gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com. Escape character is '^]'. 220 mx.google.com ESMTP z4si16632304weq.140 EHLO mail.cardwellit.com 250-mx.google.com at your service, [178.79.145.246] 250-SIZE 35882577 250-8BITMIME 250-STARTTLS 250 ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES Their MX states that it accepts messages up to 35882577 bytes in size, which is just under 35MB.
  - ianterrell 15y ago
    That's a great bit of technical expectation management. "We'll accept up to 25MB!" And then when you send something 26 or 27MB because you don't notice that it's so close to the limit, the system forgives you.
    - gvb 15y ago
      More likely it is an accommodation of base64[1] (MIME) encoding of binary files, which results in a 30% expansion (3 bytes get encoded to 4): 25MB * (4/3) = 33MB. People who read that GMail is limited to 25MB will expect their 25MB photo to be accepted. This requires the absolute size limit to be set to 33MB (probably bumped up to 35MB to accommodate the HTML body and other spurious stuff like the 25 off-topic replies). [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64

latch 15y ago

The saddest thing about this, for me, is that I work for a company where everyone (including myself) gets over their mailbox limit in a couple days...7 years.../cry

sung1 15y ago

Yeah well what I'm interested in is: what are we believing in right now that will sound just as ridiculous five years from now on?

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

loboman 15y ago

Bill Gates' question made some sense. If mails are 3k each, and you have 1 GB of space, how many mails do you need to receive per day to get out of space in 6 months? http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%281+gigabyte+%2F+3kilobyte%29+%2F+6+months http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%281+gigabyte+%2F+3kilo... the answer is 1826 mails per day. I assume what happened here is that they didn't have good stats of the mail sizes in the conversation and Bill tried to estimate something like this and as a result, he thought it was ridiculous.

cracki 15y ago
3k is a bit small... consider, those are newspaper people. they send HTML emails, PDFs, scans, photos, all that stuff. wouldn't surprise me if they collected a few megs a day. busy people.
- sesqu 15y ago
  Version control over e-mail would hit that 7MB/day limit easily, when dealing with image formats. Makes sense.
- derleth 15y ago
  > 3k is a bit small... And Gates explicitly asked how big each email was, on average.
hussong 15y ago
Maybe they email a lot with the kind of people who embed their fancy company logo as a 50K jpg into their mails, then you're down to 100 mails per day.

Deestan 15y ago

> "anchored in the old paradigm of storage being a commodity that must be conserved" The author seems to think that Google's innovation was to simply ignore the storage problem and then it went away. What they did was work immensely hard at the storage problem, until their innovations in data compression and retrieval made it possible to store larger amounts of data. http://highscalability.com/google-architecture http://highscalability.com/google-architecture

libria 15y ago

For what computers cost in 1980 compared to their utility, I'm not sure why an average household would get one.

pnathan 15y ago
An astute observation. I believe it took spreadsheets for 'personal' computers to really start taking off in the smaller business world; it wasn't until - IIRC - Windows 95 that computers took off in households. I remember that you were something special prior to '95 or so if you owned a computer.

ImprovedSilence 15y ago

I'm on a mobile phone right now, and I have to say, that was the most poorly laid out and convolouted site I've seen on a phone......

tdignan 15y ago

It's a shame that we give attention whoring journalists like this guy any attention at all. More sensational bs. If I wanted sensationalist, I'd be on reddit's /r/politics.

georgieporgie 15y ago

Only a few months after starting this, both of us had consumed more than half of Gmail's 2-gigabyte free storage space. Okay, I'm extremely suspicious of anyone who claims to process one gigabyte of email per month. Barring large attachments, that is a tremendous amount of sheer data. If you're getting that much email, you probably need culling tools more than you need space. Regarding the two gigabyte limit being shocking, it was at the time. The only reason Google could pull it off is because 1) very, very few users would get anywhere near that and 2) they were already scaling data at a ridiculous rate. A traditionally desktop-oriented software company like Microsoft would not be able to offer anything similar without tremendous investment of hardware and development.

nohat 15y ago

1GB over a few months? In text? That's ~500000 pages of text. I doubt that the reporters actually received that much email. There's probably something else draining space that they didn't realize (hence Gate's surprise).

ern 15y ago

If this was 2004, how did the author have 2GB of storage on Gmail and use "more than half", when it launched with 1 GB and was only upgraded to 2GB in 2005? ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail )