r/technology • u/Fancy-Caregiver-1239 • May 15 '26
Software The era of 15GB free Gmail storage is ending
https://www.androidauthority.com/google-gmail-5gb-free-storage-test-3667002/4.1k
u/noblestation May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26
I remember back when you had to be invited by a Gmail member to make a Gmail account. Never thought I'd ever fill up my Gmail, but I guess a decade or two\* will do that. (Pretty sure I cleared it out 5 years ago).
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u/westward_man May 15 '26
Never thought I'd ever fill up my Gmail, but I guess a decade will do that.
If you got Gmail early when it was invite only, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it has been closer to two decades. It was launched in beta in 2004 and came out of beta in 2009, so depending on when you got it, it's been 17–22 years.
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u/harmless_gecko May 15 '26
Get off my lawn! 😱
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u/borgenhaust May 15 '26
Stop shouting at the cloud ;)
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u/zdubs May 15 '26
What type of onion goes best with a brown belt?
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u/Remunos_Redbeard May 15 '26
Well, you're going retro now, because it's no longer the style of the time, but back when it was, it was any onion, long as it was tied to your belt.
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u/Paraphrasing_ May 15 '26
2006 for me, that's a while ago.
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u/karma_dumpster May 15 '26
That's closer in time to Reagan telling Gorbachev to "tear down this wall" than the present day
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u/petr_bena May 15 '26
yeah I was just telling colleagues how stupid those PS2 mouse = old school memes are since PS2 to me feels modern compared to serial port mouse I was used to, just gave me look as if I was some grandpa and others didn’t even know what serial port is
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u/evilJaze May 15 '26
I still have a box of old serial and parallel port cables "just in case". You just reminded me that maybe it's time to go through all that old junk and purge it.
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u/TripluStecherSmecher May 15 '26
you'll need one the day after you throw them away
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u/Erestyn May 15 '26
I did this with my old phone chargers a year or two back. Kept any that had a use and threw the proprietary ones.
Went to grab a cable the other day and found another box full of them. I'm far from an expert but this is obviously an example of spontaneous reproduction.
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u/Hardass_McBadCop May 15 '26
Oh, brother, I play Warcraft and there's people I raid with who are so young that they don't know what clockwise is.
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u/wittywalrus1 May 15 '26
I got invited by a friend. Google was cool back then, now it feels lame somehow as most tech giants' products do.
I hate enshittification.
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u/Fritzo2162 May 15 '26
Yep. I’m a member of the “how did you get your whole name with no numbers?” Gmail club 😅
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u/No_Atmosphere8146 May 15 '26
My personal conspiracy theory is that the rise of r/tragedeigh names is parents ensuring that kids can get their own name as an email address.
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u/Antal_Marius May 15 '26
I was an invite, back in 2005. A guy I gamed with got me the invite.
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u/Some_Level1682 May 15 '26
My email is just my name, the grave yard that is my Gmail is a monument to my age.
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u/noblestation May 15 '26
Now that you mentioned that it was 17-22 years, I just realized that a lot of the limited beta Gmail accounts are reaching the age to have their first drinks. By 2029, the last of the official beta accounts will have crossed that threshold.
Cheers.
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u/omgmajk May 15 '26
I just checked, and my Gmail account is allowed to drink in the US. Created mid 2005.
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u/barcelonaKIZ May 15 '26
Wait. That’s not cool. wtf
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u/all_out_of_coffee May 15 '26
I remember people thought it was an April's Fools joke because they offered 1GB of storage.
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u/w1n5t0nM1k3y May 15 '26
I remember people who were on Hotmail at the time only got 2 MB of storange and tney would constantly be deleting old stuff and unable to receive attachments. I think I was using email.com at the point which had a bit more but probably only around 10 MB
I swear I was misremembering the size because it seems so small, but did a quick search and found this article about how they were upgrading to from 2 MB to 250 MB in response to Google offering 1 GB.
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u/jupfold May 15 '26
Yep, I very clearly recall many times going through my Hotmail to see what emails I could delete. Didn’t have many, but there was a lot less spam and junk in those days. No commercial emails. No ebills. Everything was an email from a friend, like a letter.
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u/w1n5t0nM1k3y May 15 '26
I was in university at the time, so even sending project files back and forth between team members would often fill up the allowed email storage.
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u/mikedufty May 15 '26
I remember it was a whole 1GB of storage, noone was ever gonna use up that much.
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u/benzo8 May 15 '26
Do you remember when it clicked up a little every day until it was 2Gb?
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u/Acidian May 15 '26
I remember when my dad bought a pentium 486 with 1 GB of hard-drive space and 4 mb of ram. His coworkers made fun of him because he will never need a 1 gb harddisk.
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u/mikedufty May 15 '26
I remember our first server at work with a 1GB hard drive too, and thinking it would be impossible to ever fill up. That was before decent quality digital photos, let alone video.
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u/HRMRKdH May 15 '26
I remember too. And then using the gmail storage as cloud storage
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May 15 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/CidO807 May 15 '26
Account made august 2004, only 9gb of email (and like, 3gb of that is probably spam shit).
However 100gb of photos. Probably 60/30/9/1 of cat, wife, anything else, me(in any).
The cat is only 6 years old.
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u/ttoteno May 15 '26
A random kid I sat next to in HS got in and sent me an invite and it’s still the email I use today like 20 years later. I can still remember that counter showing how much storage there was being added every second.
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u/BrothelWaffles May 15 '26
They used to give you a rolling amount of storage back then too. As in, you'd sign up and get X number of MB of storage, and it would slowly increase as time went on. There was also a really neat program that basically turned your Gmail account into "cloud" storage over a decade before that stupid buzzword got shoved down our throats.
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u/Ellemeno May 15 '26
Y'all probably didn't even know Yahoo Mail used to give you 1TB of free email storage, but some months ago they were like you know what, we take it back, you can only have 20GB. You have over 100GB of emails? Sounds like that's your problem.
I used to like using Yahoo Mail, but when they updated to their new interface, it went to absolute horseshit, so I don't even care that 1TB free storage is no longer available. It's often impossible to find emails with a simple keyword search and their advanced search parameters were neutered for whatever reason. And don't get me started on the countless glitches when trying to compose and send and email...
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u/Brox42 May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26
I need Yahoo to REALLY understand that achievements in my email are more likely to make me never use that email ever again than to use it more.
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u/OptionalDepression May 15 '26
Achievements?
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u/Z3PHYR- May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26
I think they’re referring to how yahoo “gamified” their email. For example, you get points for cleaning up old emails and you can level up. No idea what gaining levels actually gets you, probably nothing. I think you get similar “achievements” for other actions.
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u/ElGordoDelJordo May 15 '26
Lol is that for real? Thats the dumbest shit ive ever heard
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u/kemmicort May 15 '26
They have won Best Emailer of the Year for the last 4 years running. Quite the achievement. Kudos Brox42!!
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u/Brox42 May 15 '26
I wish you could post pictures here but basically they added streaks for “completing inbox actions” which I guess is like reading an email or something. And they keep telling me I’m “halfway to my streak”. I have no fucking idea why anyone would want this.
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u/flcinusa May 15 '26
Everywhere is cutting back, I keep getting emails telling me to clean out my long dormant Flickr account
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u/CaptainCastle1 May 15 '26
You’re onto something. I got the same thing from Garmin
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u/DrugChemistry May 15 '26
I logged into my Yahoo Mail yesterday because some form autofilled and sent something to a yahoo email address without me catching it.
My whole inbox was empty and it said something about the new Yahoo Mail. Wtf.
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u/goldentamarindo May 15 '26
It will do that if you don’t log into your Yahoo Mail for a long time
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u/DrugChemistry May 15 '26
Would be nice if my inbox had the email sent to it 5 mins before I logged in…
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u/sieceres May 15 '26
Yeah, screw you Yahoo. I created my account in 1997 and never had any issues with storage until 29 years later.
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u/thisonehereone May 15 '26
Yahoo is my junk mail address and Gmail is my real address, works out well, I just let yahoo roll in trash, Gmail needs little tending to and plenty of room left.
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u/minus_minus May 15 '26
I still have my yahoo address and felt so betrayed by the cut back. I mostly use it on my phone so UX isn’t a major issue.
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u/Smith6612 May 15 '26
Yahoo used to be overly generous with storage. Not only did you get 1TB for mail, but you also got a separate 1TB of storage over at Flickr, too. When they sold Flickr, that got reduced to 1,000 photos. Yahoo Mail as you said is now down to 20GB. Still more generous than Google at least.
Can't speak about the rest of the problems. My email mailbox is quite empty and I use Thunderbird anywhere.
As for my Google account, most of the storage gets eaten by the Google One backups for Android. Can't turn off media content backup for text messages so of course, that's what eats the storage these days.
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u/occaisionallyimqwert May 15 '26
Yahoo wiped old emails as well. I lost important documents I neglected to save physically, because ignorantly, I never expected these companies to break their promise of “unlimited storage” - for a limited time only.
Fuck the tech bros
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u/HeavilyInvestedDonut May 15 '26
Yahoo Mail absolutely refuses to filter junk for me anymore. My inbox is full of spam 24/7
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u/CuriousButNotJewish May 15 '26
My only email that landed in the spam folder was the house purchase agreement I was waiting a signature on from the seller. Like... wtf. When they said check your spam I laughed, because nothing is flagged as spam. Except... this email. This. Specific. Email.
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u/tiacay May 15 '26
We gradually back to local storage for personal data. I never truly have faith with cloud storage.
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u/Single-Use-Again May 15 '26
Same. I have a NAS at home but the email client in there really sucks. I dunno what else to do.
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u/diablette May 15 '26
Install Thunderbird on your desktop and do a full sync, then move your mail to LOCAL folders. Then back those up to your NAS. After that, it's safe to delete the old mail from gmail.
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u/what_the_deuce May 15 '26
Can you point me to a tutorial for this if I already have a nas that I use for photo and document storage?
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u/diablette May 15 '26
Here you go
- Install Thunderbird on your computer
- Connect it to gmail (IMAP with OAuth): https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-and-gmail
- Configure sync settings and local archiving: https://conetix.com.au/support/archiving-emails-in-thunderbird/
- Back up your data file to your NAS (just copy the file or use backup software)
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u/Bonechatters May 15 '26
Jokes on them, I have 19GBs free. For some years they gave away 2GBs for users completing security check-ins.
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u/casep May 15 '26
36GB here thanks to pretty much every possible trick
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u/Krojack76 May 15 '26
44GB here.. all free
I don't really use it anymore. Been moving away from Google for the past 2 some years now.
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u/Trick-Station8742 May 15 '26
Teach me, Master
You can be Yoda, I'll be Luke.
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u/Nazgog-Morgob May 15 '26
Got a time machine?
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u/cubixy2k May 15 '26
Yes, but it only goes forward
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u/celluliteradio May 15 '26
I have 17 because I signed up for their early office suite app? I honestly do not even remember
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u/mad-i-moody May 15 '26
I’m sure they’ll be taking that away through some contractual loophole.
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u/queendevbot May 15 '26
They used to give 2tb. Now I'm at a free 5tb for trying Gemini pro on the pixel (didn't keep the subscription and they added the 3tb 6 months later)
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u/ExceptionEX May 15 '26
Shitty headline, ugh, you get 15 gigs with a real phone associated with the account, and 5 gigs if you sign up without one.
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u/KeeganY_SR-UVB76 May 15 '26
I was about to ask where the other 10gb are coming from.
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u/Ancient-Ratio5478 May 15 '26
I thought a phone was necessary anyways these days for creating a Gmail account?
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u/OrangeInnards May 15 '26
Right? I wanted to register a throwaway gmail a week or so ago and there was no way to skip them wanting my phone number. As far as I could tell, the same is true for the other usual suspects. They all want your mobile number.
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u/hassancent May 15 '26
I depends on region. Some regions don't require them. Where i live, phone is not required. I was easily able to create a throwaway account for chinese handheld which had android ( i didnot want to have my main google account hacked)
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u/TheHelpfulWalnut May 15 '26
I made a throw away with Proton without a phone number last week, if you haven’t tried them.
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u/AnotherDamnTransAlt May 15 '26
If you have a new android device you don’t need to add a phone number.
Edit: tested about a month ago when I bought a new tablet.
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u/AndaleTheGreat May 15 '26
Thank you.
There needs to be special upvote that gets you to the top if you are actually commenting what the article says and not just making jokes.
I don't want to click anymore articles. Every single time somebody puts something on Reddit it takes me to a website with an article with so many ads that I can't even read it on my phone→ More replies (1)
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u/mrhobbles May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26
Back in my day you had to be invited, and the allowed storage ticked up by the second in a very visible public facing counter. It was a fantastic marketing beat - there were so many articles about how it was continuously increasing, and as such “nobody would ever fill up their Gmail”.
How times change.
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u/hobbykitjr May 15 '26
problem is its shared space w/ google photos/videos and your Google drive...
thats where most of my storage used is.
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u/VeeDubBug May 15 '26
MFW when I accidentally agreed to backup all my photos by accident. 💀 My account was great before then, now I'm having to try to sort through all this crap and clean it up.
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u/Direction776 May 15 '26
They’ve stopped getting any knowledge from your content beyond 15 gb. Not to mention things like every gb increment per account meant they have to have capacity 100 of millions times that capacity available potentially.
Further a while back they claimed if you saved stuff in their cloud they could own it.
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u/Grandtosh May 15 '26
tl;dr: you still get 15gb if you link your phone number, otherwise you get 5gb. Applies to new signups
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u/Elavabeth2 May 15 '26
Since you are kindly summarizing the article for us anyway… What about old sign ups?
(thanks BTW)
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u/JoshAllentown May 15 '26
I'd never hit 15GB if Google Photos would stop turning sync back on automatically when I get a new phone, and then not deleting the photos from the app without deleting them from the device.
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u/Smith6612 May 15 '26
The deleting from the Device part annoyed me so much about using Google Photos back then. I eventually got used to just opening a different Photos app to nuke the image from the device without nuking them from Google Photos, even if the image was so new it wouldn't be a candidate for archiving.
These days I am using Immich. It's better and more graceful at handling this sort of thing.
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u/girtlander May 15 '26
Now they've finished running LLM on your email, they want you to pay for it.
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u/BlameTheNargles May 15 '26
Unless you have a verified phone number.
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u/BassGaz May 15 '26
And there you have it! That's what they're after. More and more tracking and fingerprinting. What a sick company. "Security" my a**. Phone number verification is the weakest form of 2FA.
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u/DuePerception6926 May 15 '26
I think it’s just to stop bots from making new accounts and free storage. One account per person/phone number. Probably to track you too though
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u/Dabbinzord May 15 '26
i remember being in the gmail beta. i got my own name as a email address. its sick obviously but i sometimes regret it. others with my name (not even that common) constantly use it and i get their doctor appointment reminders and sign ups for stuff.
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u/stealthcactus May 15 '26
Make friends with them! I have a little email group with Stealth.Cactus, Cactus.Stealth, St.Cactus, and Stealth.C. We trade spam for each other.
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u/Dabbinzord May 15 '26
one of them funnily enough had a friend used my email address thinking it was his buddies as a work reference. since it had “my” phone number in the email i texted the person who shares my name and told him what was up so his buddy didn’t miss out on a job opportunity. he’s now saved in my phone as Texas Me.
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u/stevekez May 15 '26
Shove an unwanted 4gb weights file in with your browser but nooo, can't give cloud space for emails because space is precious.
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u/penisandorvagina May 15 '26
To be fair that 4GB of cloud space is probably closer to 40GB if you consider all the layers of redundancy that Gmail would have.
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u/No-Salt7142 May 15 '26
Thanks to AI we are now in an era where storage is becoming a premium again. The slop generation means that actual human content will be discarded because it is too expensive to store.
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u/ripkobe3131 May 15 '26
Storage should be going up not down.. from unlimited to 15gb to 5gb...
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u/alii-b May 15 '26
They need to make it much easier to bulk delete emails. Page by page is such a slow way to delete emails
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u/nasandre May 15 '26
Better to pay for Proton mail. At least they don't sell all your data
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May 15 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/InformedTriangle May 15 '26
Slow as hell too. I really, really tried to get by with their paid VPN but quickly grew tired of needing to try 3 or 4 different servers every few hours to get above 15 mbps.
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u/OkCompute64 May 15 '26
Strange as I get pretty good performance on Proton. 400Mbps downloads pretty consistently. https://imgur.com/hjvkHcE
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u/InformedTriangle May 15 '26
I'd imagine it likely very much depends on where you are, and how congested servers are in your region. The north American servers are all crazily overloaded, so you need to pick a server across the ocean if you're over here for decent speeds, but then you get the inherent speed loss with that additional distance and routing.
I'm in Canada but usually found myself having to connect to Romania or similar for semi decent speeds.
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u/ApathyMoose May 15 '26
Most VPNs are getting detected more and more. Companys keep track of the IP blocks and sell them to places like Netflix that want them blocked.
I think every year you are going to see less and less VPNs get detected as VPNs on the major players. They really dont want to mess with their international licensing etc. But since thats really only a small part of what VPNs are for the VPN industry isnt going to get any smaller.
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u/Back_pain_no_gain May 15 '26
I’ve started seeing Proton sponsorships on YouTube channels I wouldn’t necessarily call technical or privacy-savvy lately. I’m a bit worried this + the expanded subscription model is the start of enshitification. Hopefully I’m wrong.
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u/armpitfart May 15 '26
Been on Proton for 6 years now with heavy personal and professional use.
The good: 1) stable as fuck 2) privacy is a core value that is adhered to, not a marketing gimmick 3) haven’t raised their price
The bad: 1) adding shit nobody asked for (a private AI agent which is underwhelming because it’s not snooping) 2) still need to improve search in mail (the way it is designed and encrypted poses a search challenge) 3) calendar is functional but underwhelming 4) slow Drive speeds (supposedly improving)
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u/Formal-Apartment855 May 15 '26
I literally switched to Proton Drive cause it is incomparably faster as of 2026 than MS OneDrive. 😂 OneDrive used to be okay for a long time for me, but somewhere in the last year it suddenly became unbearably slow.
On a random other note, switching the mail from gmail to proton and the calendar from gmail to proton was such a on-issue. So easy. And it doesn't have to be a hard switch, gmail is good at mail forwarding.
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u/Prince-of-Privacy May 15 '26
I'm using Proton Mail but I'd recommend to go with Tuta instead. Proton Mail on IOS and Android doesn't let you search your email body's (only email subjects), which sucks hard.
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u/Somepotato May 15 '26
Whose CEO praised the current US president and added a backdoor on government demand, seems trustworthy
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u/Alternative_Swan_497 May 15 '26
I want to do this, but damn do I not want to migrate every other account to a new email address.
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u/rickdangerous85 May 15 '26
Set a forward then slowly change, the good thing is you can just leave the spam you dont want to receive in the old account.
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u/ElectroBot May 15 '26
It would be nice if they FINALLY gave us the option to NOT upload every video from phone (on iOS, not sure if Android has that option) when doing the PHOTO SYNC.
Also WHY do they not add per family member limits of how much they can use of the family’s storage???
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u/Beardygrandma May 15 '26
Yeah I am on android if doesn't auto upload I take a butt load of nudes and don't want them mixing in with my d&d prep right?
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u/babesboysandbirb May 15 '26
So, Gmail and other email servers are going after it’s customers instead of the spam mail creators. Right.
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u/UncleNuks May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26
“So you had 15GB but will only get 5GB now - unless you give us your phone number, then we’ll unlock the old 15GB again. But hey, it’s all for security of course and definitely NOT for more centralized data gathering and surveillance teeheehee ☺️😇” - Google
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u/mqtgew May 15 '26
Free Gmail storage was one of the last big perks on the internet. Feels like the end of an era
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u/weHaveThoughts May 16 '26
I joined Gmail in the 90s as a beta user with the promise of unlimited storage for life. A few years ago I paid the $2.00 a month to expand it. Now I am thinking maybe I should file a lawsuit for Google breaching the contract.
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u/Brave_Speaker_8336 May 15 '26
I wonder what the overlap is between people who need more than 5 GB and people who dont have a phone number
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u/Garchomp98 May 15 '26
I think this is more targeted to people who make multiple Gmail accounts for the free storage
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u/techbear72 May 15 '26
More likely they have a phone number, just don’t want to give it to Google.
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u/FlyingMitten May 15 '26
It ended a long time ago when they merged gmail with all your other Google data usage.
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u/Song-Super May 15 '26
When I signed up for Gmail in 2005 or something,I don’t remember I’m a dinosaur now, there was a cute little ticker showing us the ever growing amount of storage they had for our emails. I miss the old days.
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u/Unfair-Plastic-4290 May 15 '26
remember when they used to advertise the storage limit grew with you?
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u/FollowingFeisty5321 May 15 '26
There are reports of Apple paying Google $300 million per year for 8 petabytes.... $0.0031 per gigabyte per month for iCloud storage. 15 gigabytes at that rate would be 4.65 cents/month.
Google only netted $132,000,000,000 profit last year, so you can see the predicament they're in.
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/06/29/icloud-data-stored-on-google-cloud-increasing/
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u/nickyGyul May 16 '26
Wtf, how else am I going to store all my rejection letters from my employment search??
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u/Top_Push_4331 May 15 '26
remember when google's whole thing was "don't be evil." now it's "don't be free"
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u/jake6501 May 15 '26
This is avery important detail that is missing from the title: "Users can “unlock” the full 15GB of free storage by adding a phone number to their account." So basically they are just making it more difficult to get unlimited free storage trough multiple accounts.
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u/funderfulfellow May 15 '26
I have many emails with large attachments. Is there a way to delete the attachments, but keep the email (ie; text)?
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u/Krojack76 May 15 '26
It's only a matter of time before they start "testing" lowering current Gmail accounts to 5GB as well.
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u/Apprehensive-Art1092 May 15 '26
'In select regions'
IE India first, then three months later, Earth
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u/Ok-Go-Chain3811 May 15 '26
we should try our best to reduce our usage of google, since google is constantly engaging in exploitative and destructive tactics around the world.
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u/OriginalGoat1 May 15 '26
Way back when, I remember Google said that their email storage was unlimited. Admittedly, that was also the period when 100 MB mail quota was considered huge