How Much Email Storage Space Do You Really Need?

I’m a power email user with multiple email accounts, plenty of attachments, and a dependable backup scheme.

Why are Yahoo and Google trying to give me multiple gigabytes of email storage? Don’t get me wrong. I like the price. Free is good.

Somewhere I’m sure Yahoo and Google and others have an Excel spreadsheet and a PowerPoint presentation which shows that unlimited email storage is a good thing.

It used to be that internet service providers gave their customers about 10 megabytes of storage. That became 25 megabytes which became 100 megabytes.

Along came Google’s Gmail. Trying to put a dent in the free email market, Gmail offered a full gigabyte of email storage, topping Yahoo and other freemail services.

Today, Google and Yahoo are providing what amounts to free email with unlimited message storage capability. Do you need unlimited email storage, even if it’s free?

If you’re like me, you have multiple email accounts. I’ve been a heavy internet user for well over 10 years and I have some email messages I’ve stored that go back almost 10 years.

There’s my original Yahoo email account, my school’s email account, my Mac360 email account, my Google Gmail account, my ISP’s email account, our Miller family email account, and I belong to three or four civic organizations which have email for their members.

Isn’t that enough email to keep track of? Fortunately, Apple’s Mail handles multiple accounts with ease, so I’m able to collect and store most of my email messages and attachments. Except for Yahoo and Google.

Still, with nearly a decade of email messages, a few thousand attachments, including many photos, my whole Apple Mail folder is barely 400 megabytes total. Who needs multiple gigabytes of email storage?

I suspect that not too many but that the number is growing. If Apple is skating to where the puck will be, more storage and free storage should tell us that we’ll be saving lots of email and those messages won’t be just text from grandma.

From what I can see of Apple’s Mail in Leopard, email messages will become even more graphic and image prone. With PhotoBooth and built-in iSight cameras, movie email could be the norm in the near future.

It doesn’t take many two minute video messages to make multiple megabytes of storage become multiple gigabytes of needed storage. Already I have a few dozen “viral videos” from YouTube and other locations stuffed into my Mail attachments.

How much email storage do you require now? How much email storage will we require in the not-to-distant future? And, will we have email storage scattered all over the place; on our Macs, our PCs, at Yahoo and Google and who knows where else? I would answer “yes.”

That brings up another question from one of our Mac360 readers. Encryption. Are your email message encrypted?

If so, how? If so, why? If not, why not? Jack and I once used PGP to encrypt our personal messages but it became such a paint to set up and use that we stopped using encryption. Is encryption important to you?

I can understand why sensitive government or corporate email may need an encryption system from user to user, but, frankly, I’ve not run into anyone using encryption in a couple of years.

My questions for weekend rumination are: How much email storage space do you really need and expect to need in the future? How many different email accounts do you have an use regularly? Are you encrypting your email, if so, how? Inquiring minds have a need to know.