E-mail«

As you may notice, I have added my e-mail address to the side-bar. I would be happy to hear from readers and I would like to publish such e-mails to permit a general and broader discussion.

BTW. I think it is embarrassing for Google, that I have to use a hotmail account instead of a gmail account. Alas I have not been one of the fortunate many to receive an invitation.

Conclusion: A 2MB free e-mail account is so much better than none

PS.
I just had a look at gmailbeta to see, if it was opened up for the general public. I did not think so either. Even though it seems to be years ago the 1GB email accounts were announced. Maybe I know the reason. There is a counter there:

Don't throw anything away.
Over 2658.010744 megabytes (and counting) of free storage so you'll never need to delete another message.

Is this the total free space for all gmail users? Then my memory card for my digital camera has more or less the same available space.

Or is this the space available per user? Anyway, not very clear...

If you do read on on the following pages it does come clear. It is the space available for each user. Lots of places on the Internet to receive invitations for an account. Got one just for the fun of it. But von Sclichtningen will not change before he receives a personal invitation.

Supposedly the difficulty of getting an account is deliberate politics to keep out the riff raff. Read spammers.

Let me laugh. It of course has to do with cost.

100 million users with 2 1/2 gigabyte each would need a lot of diskspace not to mention bandwidth. And that is probably a low estimate for gmail possible users. Why not one billion in a few years? Diskspace will soon become a small problem; but bandwidth and processing power is expensive. In 15 years time we will probably see 1000 terabyte disks or other storage media with the same capacity. More than 10E14 bytes. But you would still need 250 of those disks today for say 250 million users each using an average of 1 gb. Or 250.000 one terabyte disks in a couple of years. E-mails are becoming larger as well.