When Google first launched GMail, it fundamentally changed the free, web-based email service arena. The “big” players back then, Yahoo! Mail and Microsoft’s Hotmail were only allowing up to 5MB of storage, forcing users to spend more time on cleaning up their inboxes than actually using the e-mail service. Then there came Google with unimaginable mailbox sizes of 1GB for free and aggressively PRed mantra of “so you’ll never need to delete another message.”.

That was all nice and dandy, but apparently did not quite live up to the promise, since I just got this message today:

Bummer.

I was part of the early cohort of GMail users that got the service through private invitations, so I have been using it for about three years, now. That, granted, is quite a number of emails. However, I do not use my GMail as a hard disk or anything of the kind. I simply follow the mantra of GMail, by almost never bothering to delete any of my e-mails (except spam or things that get in my way). And in return I get this ungrateful message saying that I exceeded blah blah?

Grrrr… Google, shame on you! :)