May 17, 2023 15:00:00

With the announcement that Google will delete Google accounts that have not been used for two years, blog articles and executive remarks that Google can 'store emails forever' are discovered

Google

announced on May 16, 2023 that it will delete accounts that have not been used for two years. In a thread on Hacker News, a social news site that deals with this topic, there is an opinion that Google, a commercial company, understands to organize dormant accounts, but it says that you can save emails forever Gmail service started It has also been criticized for being inconsistent with the claims of the time.

Updating our inactive account policies | Hacker News
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35966318

Gmail was launched on April 1, 2004, about 19 years ago from this announcement. In a blog post today, Google said, ``We believe people should be able to keep their emails safe forever,'' and that Gmail has plenty of storage to make that possible. emphasized.

There is also

a post on Slashdot, an electronic bulletin board, citing news about the launch of Gmail. Among them, a reporter at the time said, ``Google seems to offer 1GB of free storage to email users with a service called Gmail, which is still in the testing stage, eliminating the need for users to change their addresses. We will provide it so that users can search their e-mail suite forever.'

In addition, Wayne Rosing, who was vice president of engineering at Google at the time, told the news site CNET, ``This idea means that your email can exist forever. Always index, always search, always

read past emails.'

There were free email services before Gmail, but Microsoft's Hotmail (currently Outlook.com) had 2MB of storage, and Yahoo's email service had only 4MB, which was very small. For that reason, it was common for e-mail users at that time to delete e-mails after reading them, output important e-mails and store them in another place.

Under these circumstances, Hacker News user crazygringo

points out that Gmail, which provided an exceptional storage of 1 GB for free, changed the habit of deleting mail from the end of reading.

A Hacker News user who found the aforementioned 2004 article commented , ``At the time, I thought it meant forever, but I was stupid.'' He showed disappointment that it was just a metaphor for the size of the world.

On the other hand, crazygringo said in the thread's most upvoted post , ``There are a lot of critical comments here, but I think the two-year period is pretty reasonable for a commercial company to offer. If this were a public service by the government, it would be a different story, but since it's a for-profit company that offers its services for free in exchange for advertising, there's no reason to expect it to continue to provide dormant account storage for more than two years.' and defended Google's decision.