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Quite frankly I have to wonder who in their right mind would need that much storage for email??

On the other hand however, I can see a myriad of potential (ab)uses for such a resource -- especially considering it's free.

Will those who seem hell-bent on collecting masses of kiddy-porn images realise that encrypting them and storing them in their GMail account as email attachments might be a smart way to avoid getting caught with their virtual pants down (so to speak)?

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What will authorities do if they turn up to seize a suspect's PC and find that it's completely clean?

Will they be smart enough to demand the login details for that person's GMail account so they can then check to see if it's being used as a repository for such material?

And what about those who seek to share unauthorised copies of copyrighted material such as movies and music?

Will they simply set up a raft of GMail accounts and then circulate the login details amongst those who wish to download such stuff?

The beauty of this is that once you get your illicit material onto GMail, you can then send it to any other mail account without incurring extra traffic through your own connection.

Forward a gigabyte of stuff from the contents of your GMail account and it only involves a few KBytes of traffic between your web-browser and the GMail server - you get the gigabyte of traffic from GMail to where-ever you send it for free!

It seems to me that Google might be creating a pandora's box of problems for itself by effectively offering anonymous drop-boxes for what could be illegal content.

I know that my YahooMail account has, after many years of only casual administration, grown to a total of 6MB -- and most of that is simply garbage that I couldn't be bothered erasing -- so how could anyone legitimately use 2GB of space?

Okay, maybe there *are* legitimate uses for this much mailbox space -- but can someone please describe a few such scenarios?

Maybe it might become a cool way to perform off-site backups? Just email yourself the contents of the backup from your hard-drive and then, even if your house/office burns down, you can be back in business by downloading and restoring that data.

I'm pretty sure that's not what Google had in mind when they set up GMail -- but I have no doubt that some people are already using it for such.

Tell me why you might want 2GB of email storage.

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