News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by dataflow on Thursday December 03, 2020 @04:57PM (#25295746)
> "If you're over your storage limit for two years, Google may delete your content across Gmail, Drive and Photos," the company said.

That's different from just deleting all your data because you're inactive. Which is it?

Edit: it seems both. Here's the blog post (maybe this is a better link): https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-policy-update/

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by hn_throwaway_99 on Thursday December 03, 2020 @06:22PM (#25296825)
Wow, 4.3 petabytes a day. Operating at Google's scale these days is just nuts.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by est31 on Thursday December 03, 2020 @07:03PM (#25297256)
One of the advantages of being on an exponential growth curve is that this figure has been way lower in the past. Just go back 5 years and it's only a fraction of that. 5 more years and it's even lower. The gmail/drive/etc. data that come from Google's first decade of existence probably fit into those 4.3 petabytes.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by sagarm on Thursday December 03, 2020 @10:18PM (#25298503)
The other implication of exponential data growth is that shortening retention periods is only a short term solution to storage costs.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by dvfjsdhgfv on Friday December 04, 2020 @08:34AM (#25302054)
I'd say it's the main implication. Google will have to use more drastic means soon. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by asdfasgasdgasdg on Thursday December 03, 2020 @11:41PM (#25299043)
I used to work on a certain Google product and I remember thinking a petabyte was big when our raw content store crossed that milestone. Now Linus Tech Tips can put that much storage in a single box.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by gogopuppygogo on Friday December 04, 2020 @01:32AM (#25299645)
I remember about ten years ago when 40TB of usable storage was a mid sized five five figure investment. That’s nas territory now.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by bryanrasmussen on Friday December 04, 2020 @01:58AM (#25299762)
I remember a time when 3mb of black market data was enough to get you out of the sprawl. Now you can barely get a Uber downtown for that.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by dreamcompiler on Friday December 04, 2020 @02:48AM (#25300022)
Whoa.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by nucleardog on Friday December 04, 2020 @03:16AM (#25300195)
Yep. Thats the flip side the the growth is that storage capacity keeps growing relative to price as well.

I spent $600 over a decade ago and put 7.5TB in my server. I spent $600 this year to add another 28TB.

I’m at nearly 40TB in my home server for maybe $1200 invested over the last decade.

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by asdfasgasdgasdg on Friday December 04, 2020 @08:29AM (#25302005)
One problem that we run into though is that spindle count /random access capability is not increasing correspondingly. It's an interesting challenge.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by lokedhs on Friday December 04, 2020 @06:10AM (#25301096)
I remember a bit over 20 years ago when we had a full 19" rack full of storage. It was about 500 GB if I'm not mistaken.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by sp332 on Friday December 04, 2020 @09:00AM (#25302262)
You can rent systems from Azure or AWS with 20 TB of RAM.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by znpy on Friday December 04, 2020 @01:10AM (#25299537)
Thanks for posting that, most people don't realise how much compute/storage you can actually put on a single rack cabinet nowadays.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by vageli on Thursday December 03, 2020 @09:18PM (#25298172)
How is this an advantage?
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by est31 on Thursday December 03, 2020 @09:46PM (#25298342)
Advantage in the sense that they have to store less. 4.3 petabytes times the age of Google in days is way way more than they actually have to store, as the time period when they were adding 4.3 petabytes daily is short in comparison.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by jstanley on Friday December 04, 2020 @01:34AM (#25299653)
So the advantage of being on an exponential growth curve is that today's problems are tiny in comparison to tomorrow's problems? That seems like a disadvantage!
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by knowaveragejoe on Thursday December 03, 2020 @07:50PM (#25297630)
That's mainly media. What's the deal with deleting emails of all things, as if they couldn't support that aspect indefinitely?
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by hanniabu on Thursday December 03, 2020 @07:55PM (#25297659)
People use email as a sneaky method of storage
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by fps_doug on Friday December 04, 2020 @02:18AM (#25299842)
How prevalent is that? Some nerds doing this is a drop in the ocean. Rather my bet would be on Youtube as the hungry beast that can't get enough storage. There's a loooooooot of videos that have single digit views yet need to be accessible at any time, instantly. Video is large. Doesn't youtube even keep the original file nowadays?
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by basscomm on Friday December 04, 2020 @08:26AM (#25301974)
In my experience, this is super common. Lots of average computer users send video clips, uncompressed 48 megapixel photos from their cell phones, PowerPoint presentations with embedded videos and 48 megapixel images, pdfs, and on and on. At the company where I work now several people have a 1MB gif of the company logo that they put in their signature.

Combine that with Gmail telling users for years that they had plenty of space, so there was no need to ever delete anything, and people believed it. Now you have a decade of emails with giant attachments or embeds that may or may not ever get looked at, and that keeps growing.

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by pokot0 on Friday December 04, 2020 @11:02AM (#25303791)
Deduplication solves that problem. There is only one (or very few) instance(s) of that gif on Google servers. That's why encryption will not be available anytime soon. Storage requirement would explode.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by xeyownt on Friday December 04, 2020 @11:42AM (#25304398)
You can do deduplication and encryption. The harder part is how to make it paranoid-level-privacy-friendly.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by blackboxlogic on Friday December 04, 2020 @06:30AM (#25301204)
Sounds like we need a way to encode arbitrary data into video that can survive lossy compression. Youtube filesystem?
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by perryizgr8 on Thursday December 03, 2020 @11:55PM (#25299126)
Sometimes it's the most practical way to share photos and documents, especially when iphones are involved.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by rblatz on Friday December 04, 2020 @01:17AM (#25299568)
We just use shared albums or text them to each other.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by fowl2 on Friday December 04, 2020 @03:59AM (#25300381)
it would be nice if they allowed deletion (or even dedupe!) of attachments
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by mikem170 on Thursday December 03, 2020 @09:23PM (#25298211)
Right! Maybe they are cutting email because it is not as profitable.

I agree with the other poster who brought up storage costs not keeping up with growth of stuff to store.

I wonder what this means for youtube...

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by free2OSS on Thursday December 03, 2020 @10:01PM (#25298422)
Email is the tightest grip Google has on me. Maybe YouTube.

But their Google music fail, their rising phone prices, their bait and switch photo storage, and low quality search results have caused me to change.

Any alternatives to Chrome, Firefox on both Android and Desktop are buggy, I want a different company?

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by int_19h on Friday December 04, 2020 @12:01AM (#25299164)
If you're okay with Blink under the hood, take a look at Vivaldi. It's made by some of the same people who did the original Opera, and is very much in the same spirit - instead of the modern trend of bare-bones browser + third-party extensions, it comes with "batteries included".
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by _hyn3 on Friday December 04, 2020 @11:39AM (#25304341)
Sadly, Vivaldi was sold a few years ago and no longer seems the ideal choice if you're focused on privacy and security.

https://www.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/iq33nv/brave...

When it was launched a year or two ago, Brave didn't integrate with the Chrome extension web store, but now it does (just like Vivaldi). Of course, also like Vivaldi, you may not need another adblocker since Brave has "shields" which are very easy to enable/disable (but it works fine if you install ublock origin, privacy badger, quick JS switcher, etc.)

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by rasz on Friday December 04, 2020 @11:56AM (#25304648)
You have mistaken Vivaldi for Opera.

Opera was sold to Chinese investment fund, they are scamming short term loans in Africa now.

Vivaldi was created by old Opera exec with same goals as old Opera. Their problem is not being scammy, neither is privacy. Their biggest problems are code quality - UI in javascript is sloow, closing tabs or fullscreening youtube video takes one full second. Then there is culture of secrecy - pretending open source by dumping uncompilable tar.bz2 code shreds from time to time and keeping bug tracker behind closed doors in order to not show how (not) many people work on it and what bugs they ignore for years.

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by _hyn3 on Wednesday December 16, 2020 @05:16PM (#25449536)
Ok, that's fair, thanks for pointing it out, but I thought also that Vivaldi also had part Chinese ownership.

There's also this: https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-browser-open-source/

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by kmonsen on Friday December 04, 2020 @12:21AM (#25299290)
+1 for Vivaldi. I can promise you the people behind it just want to make a great browser.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by square_usual on Friday December 04, 2020 @01:05AM (#25299505)
I tried Vivaldi for a long time, but a couple of things drew me back to Firefox eventually. The biggest problem was that it kept signing me out of Google for some reason. I've seen threads about this elsewhere, so I'm not the only person facing it. Then, the containers feature in Firefox was very useful as I have multiple "identities" in different spaces, so I could isolate them in their own containers to prevent spillover.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by fatnoah on Friday December 04, 2020 @04:45PM (#25308530)
I interviewed at G and eventually matched with teams writing software for core networking functions. In that process, the discussion came out that the software was responsible for roughly 11% of traffic...for the entire Internet.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by pishpash on Thursday December 03, 2020 @09:12PM (#25298143)
I think the main issue is storage Moore's law has really hit a wall and it is no longer the case that the data Google stores grows slower than storage per dollar like in the early days. Google's freebie business model is going to have to drastically change if the two exponents have crossed paths and they'll have to do it fast because, exponents.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by yudlejoza on Friday December 04, 2020 @10:45PM (#25311533)
I wonder what kind of HDD setup they (and AWS, and Azure, etc) are using.

A reasonable price point is that of a 10 TB HDD, you would need 430 new disks of that size everyday.

Would love to learn about what kind of contracts they enter in with hardware manufacturers.

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by yencabulator on Saturday December 05, 2020 @01:15PM (#25316799)
The storage company most willing to explain what they're doing is Backblaze. Their blog is great. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/category/cloud-storage/storag...
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by bg24 on Saturday December 05, 2020 @07:19PM (#25319739)
Is there any tutorial type doc on how businesses use the years old data? I understand the use or hot data, need for reports, queries, etc.

Looking to beef up my knowledge.

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by geek_at on Thursday December 03, 2020 @05:58PM (#25296539)
oh damn. I've created an account for my newborn son on my (free) google workspace domain and send him emails every few weeks with updates and photos. He'll receive the account when he's like 12. Will these be deleted too?
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by runlevel1 on Thursday December 03, 2020 @06:56PM (#25297181)
A policy change that sabotages an idea that Google itself gave many people just a few years ago.

Google's "Dear Sophie" ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhPklt9nYas

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by inetknght on Thursday December 03, 2020 @07:17PM (#25297395)
I wonder how close that skirts laws around false advertising
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by kuschku on Friday December 04, 2020 @04:18AM (#25300473)
Same with the Google Pixel thing, where Pixels had less storage than iPhones, but Google constantly ran ads saying that wasn't an issue because you'd have unlimited storage for all your photos and RAWs, forever, with no restrictions, as long as they were auto-uploaded by Google Photos from the Google Camera on your Google Pixel.

And now even compressed jpegs have a size and time limit.

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by disillusioned on Friday December 04, 2020 @04:53AM (#25300667)
In fairness, they've persisted this policy for the given phones being advertised.

The OG Pixel said original quality for life, and that persists. Every other Pixel until Pixel 4 had a time limit on unlimited quality original uploads, and THAT persists. And even for Pixel 4 & Pixel 5, they're persisting the unlimited "high quality" storage option that they advertised the phones as having.

Don't get me wrong, I'm annoyed enough about them dropping unlimited original on the 4/5 that I download the 4k videos off of Google Photos and re-upload them over an old Pixel I have to get them to not count against my storage limit. But the ads have matched their current commitment, and they haven't reneged on any of the policies advertised for that given phone, at least.

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by kuschku on Saturday December 05, 2020 @10:00AM (#25315003)
> The OG Pixel said original quality for life, and that persists

Mine was ended. I've got an OG Pixel.

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by vageli on Thursday December 03, 2020 @09:19PM (#25298183)
> I wonder how close that skirts laws around false advertising

At the time it wasn't fraudulent, though.

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by adrianN on Friday December 04, 2020 @05:49AM (#25300987)
If you make "forever" claims in your ads I feel like you shouldn't be able to say later that "forever" was true five years ago, but today it retroactively means a finite timespan.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by inetknght on Thursday December 03, 2020 @11:35PM (#25299000)
Wasn't it?
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by markdown on Friday December 04, 2020 @12:44AM (#25299410)
It wasn't.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by EvanAnderson on Thursday December 03, 2020 @06:26PM (#25296871)
That's a neat idea, but I'd be really, really distrustful of putting an effort of genuine feelings into a platform hosted by somebody else. That's a long time for Google not to screw it up, and it'll be sad when they do screw it up.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by danielheath on Thursday December 03, 2020 @06:49PM (#25297115)
Yeah. I run a private wordpress instance on my NAS for this purpose.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by fps_doug on Friday December 04, 2020 @02:21AM (#25299865)
Physical photographic album here.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by haggy on Friday December 04, 2020 @02:50AM (#25300030)
Local NAS with offsite backup is far more resilient than any physical item onsite. One house fire and that album goes up in smoke.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by yencabulator on Saturday December 05, 2020 @01:21PM (#25316841)
Some years back, I tried to take photos out of a random family album to scan them. The album was built so there was a plastic sheet in front of the photos, to hold them in place / protect them. Well, that sheet ended up ripping bits out of the photos, and it's glossy enough that I can't scan the photos through it. Be careful with assumptions of how long physical products last.

Also, books used to be printed on better paper; modern cheap books will not last as long as the old ones did. I have a couple of collector's edition books printed on acid-free paper...

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by fps_doug on Wednesday December 09, 2020 @02:34AM (#25356238)
:-) It's not like I'm using an old analog camera, or delete the files after printing.

It's just nice to a/ have an extra copy just in case and b/ it's more enjoyable/sentimental than looking at photos on a laptop, smartphone or TV.

At least my kids really enjoy it a lot. They liked to look at the albums my mom made from my pictures when they were between 2 and 5, still do today, even though they perfectly know how to navigate to all the photos on a tablet. That's when I decided to do it.

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by metric10 on Thursday December 03, 2020 @06:22PM (#25296828)
I would be surprised if they did this for Workspace accounts. Deleting data from a organization would be a disaster for Google. I.e. an account may be at a center of a lawsuit or subject to data retention laws.

Indeed, this says no:

https://support.google.com/a/answer/38173?hl=en

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by fletchowns on Thursday December 03, 2020 @06:38PM (#25296994)
Hmmm is my G Suite account different from a Workspace account? I got this email a few weeks ago saying I hadn't logged in for awhile and they were going to delete my data: https://i.imgur.com/XAEXQWb.png
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by alisonkisk on Thursday December 03, 2020 @07:23PM (#25297434)
This subthread is confused. Google will delete long idle nin-domain users and idle domains, but will not delete long idle users within an active domain.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by fletchowns on Thursday December 03, 2020 @07:38PM (#25297540)
Ah! That makes sense
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by Jarwain on Thursday December 03, 2020 @07:04PM (#25297267)
It's the same product; G Suite was just rebranded to Workspace
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by dannyw on Thursday December 03, 2020 @06:59PM (#25297222)
Are you a paying customer?
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by fletchowns on Thursday December 03, 2020 @07:08PM (#25297296)
No, this is a free account from way back when (2010 maybe?)
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by ValentineC on Thursday December 03, 2020 @09:10PM (#25298123)
Google deletes legacy Google Apps domains if none of the accounts at that domain are logged into for a year or something.

I've received multiple warnings for some of my unused domains.

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by scrollaway on Thursday December 03, 2020 @09:26PM (#25298227)
This I believe only applies to the root/admin account of the GSuite domain. Extra users created in the account are just extra user slots for that account.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by ValentineC on Thursday December 03, 2020 @09:41PM (#25298314)
I usually don't use the admin account as my main working account, for security.

I believe the Google Apps "target for deletion" process only gets triggered if none of the accounts in a domain are logged into for a period of time.

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by amerkhalid on Thursday December 03, 2020 @07:34PM (#25297519)
I have been writing a journal addressed to my son. It is just a markdown file. But this system has a flaw that is I go back and edit old entries.

I would never trust a 3rd party for this kind of project. But I like that you cannot edit your emails. It just feels more honest.

Now I am thinking of sending him hand written letters by mail. And just save them until he is old enough. I can add photos or his other favorite things in the letters. It would be a lot more fun to open these letters in the future instead of reading a text file.

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by Siira on Friday December 04, 2020 @01:40PM (#25306001)
Just use git. The history is there (unless you take drastic measures.).
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by stusmall on Thursday December 03, 2020 @06:13PM (#25296727)
I just wanted to say I love that idea. It's adorable. I hope you find a way to keep the account intact for him to open.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by rapnie on Friday December 04, 2020 @03:32AM (#25300268)
ProtonMail just launched an import/export tool that not only allows you to store your mails locally, but provides easy migration paths from Gmail, Yahoo, etc. Might be something to look into, and will also probably be a boon to privacy overall.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by mehrdadn on Thursday December 03, 2020 @06:03PM (#25296601)
I don't know but I would suggest (at least) logging into the account and doing something (uploading a file, sending an email, etc.) every year.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by josephg on Thursday December 03, 2020 @06:19PM (#25296791)
I would also suggest yearly doing a full backup of the account:

https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout

Gmail backup archives are easy enough to load and read in other email programs, if google's storage ever becomes unreliable for you.

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by snazz on Thursday December 03, 2020 @06:32PM (#25296940)
Google even lets you schedule them every two months, which works nicely for me.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by pnutjam on Thursday December 03, 2020 @09:42PM (#25298322)
I do daily backups using the API.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by snazz on Friday December 04, 2020 @08:38AM (#25302080)
Oh, clever. Is there an open-source solution for this that I could look at?
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by pnutjam on Sunday December 06, 2020 @01:37PM (#25325474)
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by ska on Thursday December 03, 2020 @06:21PM (#25296820)
It seems like only if you are over storage.

Regardless, all you'd have to do is log into it once a year to avoid this. You should probably be backing it up externally at least this often if you care about the content...

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by Zarel on Thursday December 03, 2020 @07:24PM (#25297438)
It looks like it does this if you are over storage or if your account is inactive.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by pishpash on Thursday December 03, 2020 @09:14PM (#25298154)
How is "inactive" defined? Maybe they're really going after people who create accounts primarily for free additional storage.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by wheresvic3 on Friday December 04, 2020 @02:38AM (#25299957)
I used to do exactly this. However, a couple of years ago when my second child was born I got a family domain and gave them both local email addresses. Then it was just a matter of getting a cheap email host and migrating over from gmail.

I also have a regular ema backup script that backsup the inboxes so the emails are always available offline!

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by Cyph0n on Thursday December 03, 2020 @07:10PM (#25297317)
I recently had an idea for a similar service that uses a storage account of your choosing as a backend. The plan was to market it as a “vault” for your emails and attachments.

Basically, you get an email address, and any email you send to it is streamed to a storage account of your choosing, with optional minimal processing (e.g., convert your emails into Markdown prior to storage).

I spent a while setting up the mail processing backend using Postfix + a mail filter written in Rust.

I ultimately ended up scrapping the project because:

A) It didn’t seem like there was a large enough market of paying customers.

B) There already are a few services that do something like this, but with a focus on attachments.

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by rsync on Thursday December 03, 2020 @09:19PM (#25298182)
You can sort of do this now by:

- dump your gmail to gdrive with "google takeout"

- dump your gdrive with rclone (to some cloud service or whatever)

https://forum.rclone.org/t/is-it-possible-to-directly-backup...

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by firecall on Thursday December 03, 2020 @09:27PM (#25298234)
Not if you are a paid user, I dont think.

So maybe you could become a paid user, then add that account to your family account?

But certainly, you should back that account up. And consider moving to another service.

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by snazz on Thursday December 03, 2020 @06:19PM (#25296800)
I'm not seeing the Inactive Account Manager on my paid Google Workspace account, so I don't think it applies there. If it does on legacy free domains, I'm guessing that you'll get a notice in one of the admin newsletters.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by roneythomas6 on Friday December 04, 2020 @05:47AM (#25300979)
No it won’t, I manage gsuite accounts for non profits and I have multiple accounts which are inactive for two years and the data still remains.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by sulam on Thursday December 03, 2020 @06:00PM (#25296552)
It seems you need to actually use the tool, ie, this is a service they're offering, not something they (currently) do without active involvement.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by toast0 on Thursday December 03, 2020 @06:18PM (#25296781)
On the other hand, they literally advertised this use case on tv. Kind of rude to make it not work.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by alisonkisk on Thursday December 03, 2020 @07:25PM (#25297446)
It does work.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by maxerickson on Thursday December 03, 2020 @08:10PM (#25297772)
Someone did this but skipped the setting up an account and sent the emails to me.

I was very glad that they understood the mistake right away once I pointed it out.

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by Triv888 on Thursday December 03, 2020 @06:26PM (#25296860)
Just dont delete the emails from your sent folder... But of course still back it up
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by zelly on Thursday December 03, 2020 @08:48PM (#25298017)
Pay for your own hard drives
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by loloquwowndueo on Friday December 04, 2020 @07:26AM (#25301510)
Time to print those emails and start using a binder from now on ...
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by tehabe on Thursday December 03, 2020 @07:11PM (#25297331)
Emails already counted against the 15 GB quota for free accounts. So no change there.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by 1vuio0pswjnm7 on Thursday December 03, 2020 @07:02PM (#25297249)
I have read about users who are receiving someone else's mail. They have some account that has been set to forward mail. It then appears that either (a) Google assigns the address to someone else (perhaps due to inactivity) or (b) someone else keeps inadvertently typing this email address. The mail gets forwarded to some other user.

If this is true, this calls the whole notion of "Gmail security" (and more generally large third party email provider security) into question. Now think about all the changes Google makes in the name of "security". One misspelling or typo and it is all for naught. The mail is sent to another user.

Does it really make sense to use a free third party email provider like Google for important purposes. It seems like we are making identity theft even easier (not to mention online ad services). One thing we know is Google will not discourage use of Gmail for important matters linked to a real identity. They want more personal information, not less. Meanwhile Google discourages automated creation of accounts not linked to real identities, which would be safer if compromised.

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by v0tary on Thursday December 03, 2020 @07:33PM (#25297510)
Yes. I can prove that this is real. I had a Gmail account that I registered when I was younger and did exactly that - setup a forward to my alt (which over the years became my primary). A few years ago I started receiving emails for another person with my same name. Legit work emails, party invites and the like. Turns out that person was using my original email.

I never contacted anyone about this for fear Google would just delete both accounts to save their own asses.

Still receive those emails to this day.

However recent times have convinced me that it's time to move away from the big ol G. This is space issue is one of them.

mailcow anyone?

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by TheDong on Thursday December 03, 2020 @07:56PM (#25297664)
> Yes. I can prove that this is real

There's also at least two alternative explanations.

I also get a lot of emails to an account I own from someone who keeps using my email instead of theirs. You'd think they would have noticed they aren't receiving them by now, but apparently not. Are you also totally sure that it's not just someone else entering an email address they don't own for work and party invites?

And for a second explanation, are you sure it wasn't hacked/stolen?

There's groups of people out there that bruteforce and then sell OG accounts, such as short twitter handles and common firstname.lastname email accounts.

The fact that the forwarding rules are still setup and working actually leads me to think it's more likely someone else stole the account rather than that it was deleted and recreated, assuming someone else really has access to it.

There's other possible ways your account could have been compromised too, like having a backup email address for it on some other email provider or domain that did go under or get compromised, but a weak password or a re-used password from a leak seem most likely for the compromise route.

Do you have evidence somehow that the account wasn't stole in that way?

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by v0tary on Thursday December 03, 2020 @08:06PM (#25297736)
The emails aren't just one way. I don't see the emails in my sent items, but when the receiving party replies (his boss) I see the original email that was sent from my old email address.

The party invite was from a real person, not those evite sites.

I can no longer login to the old account and my recovery options no longer work.

While yes, the possibility of a hacked account crossed my mind, but Gmail is pretty loud when someone logs in from a new ip.

This has been atleast 2 years now.

Maybe I should call him. He isn't doing well with his realtor sales.

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by chad_c on Thursday December 03, 2020 @10:25PM (#25298536)
Another explanation is the address changes Google introduced. I’m not sure when, but my [email protected] became addressable as [email protected]. Someone else originally created [email protected] and I get their emails.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by ridaj on Thursday December 03, 2020 @10:53PM (#25298687)
Periods have always been discarded by Gmail when routing mail, as well as signing in. If you own [email protected], you've owned [email protected] all along, as well as [email protected] for that matter.

You're getting that other person's email because someone has the wrong address for them.

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by robjan on Thursday December 03, 2020 @07:55PM (#25297660)
I also receive emails and invites for someone else but I actively use my Gmail account. I think it's just people misspelling email addresses.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by bhrgunatha on Thursday December 03, 2020 @08:54PM (#25298043)
I've got several of these for one active email in particular. I've always thought it was bad data entry. There is a cluster in the US south - Georgia, Texas and Alabama.

At first I tried to rectify the mistakes but gave up due to lack of response.

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by ridaj on Thursday December 03, 2020 @10:58PM (#25298717)
Google doesn't recycle Gmail addresses. https://webapps.stackexchange.com/a/90016

What does happen somewhat often though, is that people receive other people's mail because it's been misaddressed by the sender.

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by 1vuio0pswjnm7 on Friday December 04, 2020 @12:52AM (#25299443)
Google suggests available addresses when signing up to Gmail. Perhaps they could try to address the problem of mispellings and typos by at least warning the user about the Levenshtein distance from similar, already registered addresses, and the potential for misdirected email as a result.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by martius on Friday December 04, 2020 @04:01AM (#25300395)
This would allow to guess existing email addresses which is not a good idea.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by sam1r on Thursday December 03, 2020 @05:39PM (#25296275)
Curious if one would even receive the notification emails prior to content deletion.

Once you hit the 15gb limit, you stop receiving emails within 24 hours. 2 years is plenty time versus "Hey. You are out of storage. In 24 hours, we're cutting off communication." [1]

[1] https://imgur.com/a/fBrlu4t

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by jeffbee on Friday December 04, 2020 @12:13AM (#25299237)
The one time I ran out of quota in Gmail, because Google backup for MacOS has a serious bug, I did not receive the notice because the same batch job that disables delivery for your account is the one that sends you the email. I didn’t get the message until a week later when I figured it out and deleted some photos. Pretty dumb.

Also, Gmail delivers an in-band message about your quota, but not in Inbox, Inbox for iOS, nor the Gmail app for iOS nor Gmail for mobile web. ONLY Gmail classic for desktop web. So I didn’t get those banners, either.

In other words I still find this quota system difficult to use despite the fact that I was the tech lead of Gmail delivery SRE for years.

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by pishpash on Thursday December 03, 2020 @09:26PM (#25298224)
It's high time for somebody to make an appliance running open protocols that behaves like cloud applications but that is owned and hosted at one's home. Maybe it's what NAS is turning into, but open, and more broadly conceived: for email, chat, etc.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by inquirerofsorts on Thursday December 03, 2020 @10:20PM (#25298510)
Nextcloud Hub does all of this:

https://nextcloud.com/hub/

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by mehrdadn on Thursday December 03, 2020 @09:30PM (#25298256)
I imagine unreliability of home networks just makes this a bad idea for things like email even if you somehow managed to get around all the other obstacles like security/privacy/trust issues (spam, etc.)
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by pishpash on Friday December 04, 2020 @02:18AM (#25299843)
But all of this is separable: storage at home, transport/computing provided by Google. So security and trust verification can come from Google (or any other provider) but emails stay home. Or photo processing provided by Google, but photos stay home. That would however relegate them to a pipe and service provider and possibly force them into openly competing, so they would never do that. Owning your data for the lock-in is the point.
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by msh on Friday December 04, 2020 @05:55AM (#25301020)
Thats what the helm appliance tries to do: https://www.thehelm.com/

If you search HN there is a quite interesting thread on it.

Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by pnutjam on Thursday December 03, 2020 @09:44PM (#25298331)
Re:An update to storage policies across your Google Account by donatj on Thursday December 03, 2020 @06:20PM (#25296809)
The original link should be replaced with this one. The original is clickbait