Welcome to Your Weekly Paradigm Shift: Very Large "Free" Web E-Mail Accounts

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Welcome to Your Weekly Paradigm Shift: Very Large "Free" Web E-Mail Accounts

7/14/2004

By Terry Calhoun

This week I asked J'e St Sauver to give us his take on the implications of Google's Gmail for higher education institutions. He's done an excellent job of summarizing the pros and cons and suggesting some interesting twists to the implications.

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J'e St Sauver, Ph.D. (j'e@uoregon.edu)

The folks at Google have turned their eye to free Web e-mail accounts, and in typical Google fashion, they're making quite a splash: each Gmail user gets a 1,000MB worth of disk space. To put that in perspective, if you're at a typical college or university, your university e-mail account probably has a quota of 50 to 100MB.

Under some circumstances, a "mere" 50 to 100MB quota may be more than enough. For example, if you routinely download your e-mail to a PC using POP3, 50 to 100MB will probably be more than enough space to act as a buffer in the interval between downloads-you can do the bulk of your long term e-mail storage on your PC's large hard drive.

Unfortunately, most people don't read their e-mail using POP3. They use Web e-mail (and leave their mail on the server), or IMAP (and leave their mail on the server), or they may even a command line e-mail client such as pine (which also leaves the mail on the server). When that's the case, 50 to 100MB to hold all your e-mail may feel like a Dixie cup of water at high noon in the middle of the Sonoran desert in August.

Google, on the other hand, will give you virtually all you'd want to drink, with plenty left over for a shower, for watering some needy cactus, and for making mud pies, too.

Moreover, Google gives users not just raw disk space, cool as that may be in and of itself, Google also gives you private indexing of your e-mail-the ability to privately "Google" a gigabyte of stored e-mail is obviously quite helpful, and not something that non-Google folks will be able to deliver (by definition).

Notwithstanding that, I predict that others *will* try to keep up with Google. For example, Yahoo! Mail Plus will be offering 2,000MB of storage, POP access, mail forwarding, and other features for a nominal yearly fee, and Hotmail Plus will be doing much the same thing.

For this audience, however, the interesting question is "what will colleges and universities do?"

Will colleges and universities join the keep-up-with-Google club, or will they try to just muddle along with their good old 50-to-100MB quotas?

There's risk either way. Let's begin by considering what happens if colleges and universities try to "keep up with the Googles."

Going from 50-to-100MB quotas to 1,000-to-2,000MB quotas means that suddenly I/O throughput will become key, and unfortunately many university e-mail systems skate right on the thin edge of I/O congestion at the best of times, largely due to our friend Mr. Spam. Increasing the size of your faculty/staff/student e-mail disk quota puts you at risk of saturating your disk farm, either in terms of operations/second or delivered throughput.

At least for some POP3 and IMAP based architectures, the key equation quickly becomes:

(number of users)*(inbox size in MB/user)*(access frequency)