Or not?

Aug 13, 2007 08:06 GMT  ·  By

Let's do a quick test. Login in to your Gmail account and scroll down to the bottom of the page. As you can see, there is a short green line that informs you about the Gmail storage size as well as the percentage of free space. "You are currently using 109 MB (3%) of your 2887 MB," it says in my case. Well, I'm one of the unlucky guys because it seems that Gmail is now offering up to 9GB (9,030 MB) of storage size. I'm not sure this is an upgrade prepared by the Mountain View company, but Philipp Lenssen from Google Blogoscoped tries to find the answer.

"Many are speculating right now that this increased Gmail storage is reflecting the overall storage for those who have a Picasa Premium account. A Google Picasa Premium account starts at 6.25 GB for $25/ year. 6.25 GB + the normal 2,886 MB I?m seeing adds up to 9,286 megabytes, which is at least in the range of the 9,030 MB number," he wrote.

As far as I can see, Gmail displays the entire storage size of your Google account meaning that it also includes other services, such as Picasa. Following the recent release of Google storage size upgrade function, the users are now able to increase their account's capacity with up to 250 GB with no less than $500 per year. Philipp Lenssen explains that some of the users who reported the 9GB Gmail availability might purchase additional storage size, so the email service shows the entire capacity of the Google account.

"Instead of 6.25 GB for Picasa, this page lists 6 GB... and 6 GB + 2886 MB exactly matches the 9030 MB. "Each Google service offers you some free storage," the Google page reads and continues, "You can use your paid storage across many Google services," Philipp Lenssen explains.