Hacker News Reader

Comment by laumars | Hacker News Reader

I’m often the first to criticise Google but what they’re doing here isn’t exactly unprecedented. Free online mail providers have been removing inactive users since the 90s. Cloud storage providers remove inactive free users. A lot of companies even have a far more aggressive time line (pretty sure 90s Yahoo Mail was in the region of months rather than years) so 2 years seems pretty generous to me.

At the end of the day if you’re neither paying for nor even using the service, then why should they keep your account active? They have no obligation to store people’s data indefinitely at their own expense.

View on HN

Part of the reason everyone switched to GMail is because, unlike the other free online mail providers, they didn't do this kind of bullshit.

Maybe? It certainly wasn't why I switched. The gmail interface was so much cooler and faster than any of the other providers, and gmail's spam detection actually worked. The amount of storage available was nice, but I certainly gave no thought to the notion that Google would preserve my stuff indefinitely if I didn't use it.

Really? I don’t recall that being the motive of any of my mates who signed up (I was still happy with Yahoo Mail at that time so was a late arrival but had plenty of friends who switched early on, many in the beta stage). From what I recall most switched because it was new, prettier and backed by a, then, trendy brand.

Those guys certainly didn’t think about retention periods because they were checking their mail regularly anyways.

People switched because in a time when mail providers were giving you 5-10MB of space, Google offered 1GB. And the spam filtering was way better than other offerings.

Yes, and the reason why that was a breakthrough is because you no longer had to clean up your server-side inbox - you could just leave stuff there, and it'd always come up in search. It was this combo - enough storage to never delete anything, and search good enough to find things in the resulting heap - that made it so much better than all alternatives.

And I distinctly remember Google emphasizing the storage / never-delete part of it in their ads and outreach. I very much doubt it would be actionable in any legal sense, but it's certainly a change of paradigm for them to do this.

A premise one hears fairly often is that online advertising sucks, but it's a necessary evil to get all this cool free stuff from Google. So if the cool free stuff is less cool and less free that raises questions about whether there should still be online advertising. I don't actually subscribe to the above, it's just something you hear again and again.

People (majority) hate both - paying for a service and advertising. They are a business after all. If you compare it with Apple, Google's storage is still a lot cheaper and offer more free storage upfront. Sure, Apple probably doesn't make money by scanning the content for advertising, but you're already seeing another (sibling comment to yours) calling it 'Bullshit' because they would now start deleting content of inactive users for 2 years.

Gmail doesn’t provide a way to delete the big emails. They just let you go over limit, you don’t know what is consuming resources, and you get charged for it.

So, like AWS.

Gmail search is very powerful. Try searching:

has:attachment larger:10MB

Ok but there’s no way you actually understand how attachments are counted against your quota unless you’re a google insider or they radically improved the UI since I last did this.

This post goes into how there's now a storage management page: https://one.google.com/storage/management

Sometimes you want that email address to forward somewhere because you used it for years. Maybe Google should consider allowing a permanent email forward and then more people could delete that gmail account they don't use.

Forwarding still costs Google bandwidth and storage.

It’s also not a great long term solution for yourself as you’re introducing more moving parts into your content delivery that can fail. Really it should be seen as a short term strategy for deprecating old addresses rather than a solution that runs indefinitely. And that’s just good practice irrespective of Google’s retention policy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com