I just took a look at my Gmail account, and I read the following line: You are currently using 0 MB (0%) of your 1000000 MB. Google had surprized everyone when they announced that they would give free users of their e-mail service an unprecidented 1000 MB (nearly a gigabyte) of e-mail storage space. Now it seems that that number has multiplied by 1000. They're offering nearly a whole terabyte of space!

A terabyte of space for e-mail is unheard of. The average modern hard drive stores 40, 80, or 120 megabytes. A terabyte of storage is like having ten or so good hard drives just to store your e-mail. Here's an example that might give a better picture: The Internet Archive is a service that regularly crawls the Internet and saves caches of the webpages, images, etc. that it finds onto its own servers. All old caches are saved and are available for users to view. It attempts to make a cache archive of the entire Internet on its servers, caching a new copy of each webpage about once or twice a month on average, dating back to 1996. All of this takes up about 300 or so terabytes. Gmail currently has probably a few thousand users, and will have many times more when it fully opens up to the public. This means that several thousand terabytes of space are being dedicated just to their e-mail service. Also take into account data backups, and you have a few times more additional space used up. That means that Google could back up every website on the Internet, images included, several times a month for many years and would still have space to spare. It means that Google is larger than the entire Internet!

Now, keep in mind that it's possible this is some sort of glitch, and that Google still intends to give users just a gigabyte of storage each (which is still a whole lot more than most people will ever need). But with other services such as Spymac and Lycos also offering nearly a gigabyte of storage (1000 MB), if Google could really afford to give users nearly a terabyte, regardless of whether or not a terabyte is even remotely necessary for practical use, it would totally shut down any competition.

A terabyte is technically 1024 gigabytes, a gigabyte is 1024 megabytes, a megabytes is 1024 kilobytes, and a kilobyte is 1024 bytes. In plain text formats, a single character (such as a letter, number, symbol, or space) takes up one byte of storage space. A terabyte can store 1,099,511,627,776 characters. Gmail's offering would actually be able to store 1,073,741,824,000 characters. According to Yahoo! (Reference), the average e-mail without an attachment is 15 KB and the average e-mail with an attachment is 35 KB. Let's assume that on average you will have one e-mail with an attachment to every ten e-mails without. That means that with Gmail's service, you could store about 5,667,978 e-mails. If you receive ten e-mails a day, then it would take you about 1,552 years to fill up your account!