Kansas.com (The Wichita Eagle):
Gmail's sign-in page (http://gmail.google.com) proclaims: 'Gmail is an experiment in a new kind of webmail, built on the idea that you should never have to delete mail . . . (with 1 GB) of free storage so you'll never need to delete another message.'Never say never. Even the biggest inbox will fill up someday, at which point you're blocked from receiving or sending more messages. Most of us regularly receive big messages, with embedded pictures or attached files such as spreadsheets and music files. An active user might fill a 1 GB inbox in a year or two. It will be agonizing to figure out which messages to delete among 10,000 or 30,000 or 50,000, especially when the free e-mail services today are limited to manual message-by-message deletion. What's needed are tools for managing bulk deletion, such as features to erase all messages older than a certain date or erase all messages from specified senders.
I asked representatives of Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Walla and Spymac about this. They acknowledged the problem, and said they would implement solutions before most people get anywhere near their limits. I hope so, because free Web e-mail is a valuable service -- even if users have to put up with exposure to ads -- that's getting much better with the arrival of Gmail.
