We are all familiar with the expression “If you got a hammer everything looks like a nail.” For many people, email is the hammer and local files tend to be the nail. At several occasions I’ve heard users complaining over their email service is ‘crappy’ because they cannot ‘send their files.’

Only a few years ago, the industry standard for maximum attachment sizes were one, or perhaps five megabytes. Then Gmail came along, allowing users to email files up to 25 megabytes. People were cheering. Finally they could email their 20 megabytes Power Point-presentations to 30 people in one go (without even knowing it was 600 megabyte of data that left the server). All of the sudden, Gmail’s seemingly impossible-to-fill storage quota started to fill up. First 25% full, then 50% and then exceeded 75%. How on earth did we get there? Only a few years earlier, 1GB was plenty for years worth of email.
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