Mac Lab Report

With Gmail at 1 Gig and Yahoo at 100 MB, It's Time to Increase .mac Email Space

- 2004.06.21

An article on Apple-X.net recently made a point I've been thinking about for some time. Recent announcements by Google and Yahoo that email account storage space is growing throughout the "free email" world is going to put additional pressure on Apple to increase the amount of storage offered for .mac users.

As the writer at Apple-X.net writes, "The current limit is a mere 15 MB. Come on, Apple! I can get 25 MB on Hotmail, 100 MB on Yahoo, and a gig on Google. Fifteen megs? It all looked so great until recently."

Yeah, .mac is more than just online storage and email. I love the integration with iBlog; the ability to publish directly from iPhoto, and all the free software, some of which I actually use. [Editor's note: It's also great for publishing your iCal schedule and using iSync to keep things synchronized between two or more Macs.]

In my opinion, it's worth the money for the entire package, although not everyone uses everything that Apple includes.

Many people use .mac as email and storage only, and they may ask themselves why Apple can't up the storage limits a little bit when other services are offering (just that feature only) for free.

Now we all know that Apple habitually installs less RAM in their computers than we think they should (for a base configuration anyway), so it's unlikely they'll try to match Gmail's 1 GB storage space. But they could bump the base configuration up to 100 MB for email and 200 MB for storage by allocating a little more hard drive space to each user.

Of course, all those folks who already pay extra for additional space will have to have upgrades, too.

Thanks for a great service, Apple - but if you can find it in your hearts and wallets to bump the storage up a bit, we'd all appreciate it.

Jeff Adkins is a science teacher who isn't afraid to state his preferences in computing platforms. In his classroom he has everything from a beige All-in-One to a a G4 XServe, and they all work together nicely. He calls himself the "poster child for technology integration" in the classroom. He was the 2006 Outstanding Educator of the Year for the California Computer Using Educators (CUE) organization. He also maintains a site for astronomy teachers at www.AstronomyTeacher.com.

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