Is there a limit on the number of emails stored worldwide? How much longer can growth continue?

Answer

At the moment, it doesn’t look like we’ll be hitting a limit anytime soon. Most email providers put a limit on the size of a mailbox – at Google’s GMail, that’s almost 7 GB per mailbox as I write this. But most people don’t even touch a fraction of that: in my personal mailbox barely 5% of the available space is used, and I get quite a lot of mail. Google will therefore not set aside 7 GB for me, but will use a smaller size internally (1GB for example) and use the rest for other users. As soon as I need more space, I will automatically be given a little more, without me seeing it myself.

Moreover, there is often a limit on the size of the emails you can send: For example, an email provider can only allow you 10 MB of attachments.

The hard drives that are getting bigger and bigger also make it no problem at all to give so much space. Hard drives of 1 terabyte are now available in shops – a few years ago 120 gigabytes was still a lot. While an ordinary e-mail usually only contains text, and now and then a photo – the size of an e-mail varies from a few kilobytes to a few megabytes at most, so on average you can store several million on a single hard drive. disk. You have to work really hard to get a million emails, so it’s certainly not that fast. And then again: a hard drive is very cheap.

Of course, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo don’t store all those emails on a single large computer. Google has an entire server park available, consisting of an estimated 450,000 servers. Then if the majority of people only use a few percent of their mailbox, they can offer very large mailboxes without any problem and they won’t get into trouble anyway – by the time they get into trouble, the hard drives can again multitude of data.

What is a problem is spam. About 80% of all e-mail traffic is spam, and almost all e-mail providers invest in spam filters to combat this. Even if it only partially succeeds: because it accounts for such a large share of mail traffic, a small reduction in the spam content in e-mail traffic provides a lot more space on a company’s servers, and also on a whole network traffic relief.

A second possible problem can be the bandwidth on the cables. Even if you get all e-mail traffic through a single cable in a company, there is of course a limit on how much data you can send. But the internet providers play a similar game here: most internet subscriptions – certainly in Belgium – still have a data limit, which ensures that the network does not collapse under excessive traffic.