Just in the nick of time for moi, Google has decided to let us pay it money to increase the storage space on our gmail accounts. If you want to go from 2.8G to 9G, go here and pay $20. You can use the extra 6G for any Google service you want.

I am at 97% of capacity at gmail. So, a few days ago I began the ridiculously contorted dance required to boost your gmail storage. I paid Google $50 for a Google Apps account, which gives me 10G. But, at least as of a couple of days ago, you couldn’t apply that gigabytage anywhere except within your new gApps account. No problem, I thought. I’ll just move my 82,000 messages from my old gmail account to my new gApps mail account; I use gmail primarily as a pop server anyway, so there’d be no visible change in my email address. Besides, you can always forward your mail.

Amazingly, Google does not provide a way to transfer mail content from one account to another. (It also provides virtually no tools for managing large volumes of mail — just try deleting all your attachments from before, say, 1996, if you have a couple of thousand qualifying attachments.) So, I downloaded gxfer, a free software tool that does the deed. It’s simple and it works, but it’s sloooow…at 200 messages per hour, the transfer time is often measured in weeks. (The folks at LimitNone who make for this freeware were really helpful when I had questions. The throttle is not their software but the fact that Google doesn’t provide an API for doing the transfer. They stepped into the breach. Thank you, LimitNone!)

Then, yesterday I woke up to discover that gmail said I had 9GB available to me. Was Google starting to upgrade everyone, starting with the maxed out users? Did Google just like me for who I am? Nah. It turns out that I had bought an upgrade for my free Picasa account about a year ago because we were storing our extended family’s photos, and Google had made that extended disk space available to gmail as well.

Yay for Google. At last they figured out that the only thing keeping us from paying them money was them. Heck, I would have been willing to pay them money to let me pay them money to get the disk space. [Tags: google gmail ]

Categories: Uncategorized dw