Around Christmas, I started getting a notification in my Gmail that I had reached my storage limit. Gmail has always had storage limits, but they were so large relative to the size of a single email or even tens of thousands of emails that no one noticed. Then, sometime in the last two years, Google started lumping all my “data” — from Gmail, Photos, and Drive — into a single bucket that turned out to be only 0.01GB larger than all my data. I had used 16.99GB of data, with only 15GB in Gmail, and it was suddenly sitting at a 17GB space. If I hit the limit, Google warned me, at some point I would stop receiving all my emails. I could look up what data Google had suddenly decided was so large and try to manage it, or I could buy more storage, for $2 a month.
From poking around the Gmail support pages, as far as I can tell, I came up with this storage limit due to email attachments, since there are only 50 emails in my inbox with attachments larger than 10MB and another 30 emails with attachments of 5MB (you can check this yourself by typing “has:attachment larger than:10M” into Gmail’s search field). Google is probably hoping I won’t try to figure this out and pay the relatively small amount of money to avoid this problem, and I admit I’m pretty close to doing so because it’s an extremely annoying problem. My Gmail crashes every time I try to delete a significant number of emails – just 754 emails, from the “Trash” folder, which is automatically deleted after 30 days by default (and probably shouldn’t count against the storage limits, but it does).
It’s a bit ironic that Google is suddenly trying to charge me to store my data when it’s been making money off of it for so long. Not only that, but theoretically, the more data Google has, the more money it “makes” from me. It’s like a bank charging me for having too much money in my account. The best part is that Google has read my emails and attachments. It knows where I go and who I talk to, that I’ve searched in every moment of insecurity or stupidity, and it uses this frankly massive set of information to serve me targeted ads.
Meanwhile, most of the emails I have in my mailbox, I didn't ask for. I've subscribed to some newsletters and while I'm pretty diligent about unsubscribing, they show up anyway. I've also received emails from companies whose contact forms I haven't filled out. The companies that collect and use my data, like Google, undoubtedly play a huge role in the sheer volume of emails I receive, making the sudden storage limit a triple injustice: Google profits from my personal information, calculating the volume of data, simultaneously offering my data to advertisers at every possible opportunity and then charging me for it, all at the same time.
