Gmail is still just the third most popular free webmail service (the top two are Yahoo Mail, with about 70 million users, and Hotmail, with about 45 million users; Gmail has about 25 million). However, those who use the service tend to be devoted – sometimes even fanatical. That’s due to the large number of features that Gmail includes that other services simply don’t, including items like color-coded labels, the various Gmail Labs, advanced filtering, and automatic contact saving. That least feature is very popular for those who don’t want to go through a contact-saving procedure at the end of every email: Google just stores the person’s name in your book for future reference.
Originally, Gmail had a limit of 10,000 contacts for this service. Anything beyond that and you were just out of luck. But some Gmailusers are apparently hitting 10,000 and were kind of frustrated. Google responded by quickly extending the limit to 25,000. “We want you to be able to store all of your contacts in a single place, so starting today [May 4th] we’ve increased the limit for all Gmailusers,” stated Mike Helmick, software engineer on the Gmail team. The limit increase also applies to anyone using any version of Google Apps.
Alongside this increase comes an expansion of the limit for each individual contact’s file size. Previously, each contact could have no more than 32 kilobytes of information attached. That limit has been quadrupled, allowing far more in-depth and consistent notes in the contacts section. Users don’t have to do anything to enable these expansions. They were automatically rolled out earlier this week.
[via the Gmail Blog]
