Every Gmail account comes with 15 gigabytes of storage.
Davis Carver doesn’t think that’s enough.
Carver, an assistant manager at Home Depot, said he considers himself a “man of caution.”
“I get a lot of emails sometimes,” Carver said. “Last Friday I got around 20. Most were in my spam folder, but three of them were work-related.”
The three work-related emails, a discussion between Carver and a fellow employee about whether wrought iron nails still deserved shelf priority over wire nails, took up an estimated 1.99 megabytes of space. It would require 22,610 more emails of similar size to fill a standard Gmail inbox.
Google currently charges $4.99 a month for an extra 85 gigabytes of space. They also offer an extra 185 gigabytes, totalling 200, for $9.99, a price that Carver found fair.
“303,030 emails really isn’t that many, if you think about it,” Carver said. “I just don’t want to be caught with my pants down.”
When asked why he doesn’t delete old emails to save space, Carver was surprised.
“There’s a reason it’s illegal to burn your mail,” he said.
As of September 13, there is no U.S. law against the burning of mail.
Cassie Kervenik, an engineer at Google, is a project leader in the Gmail division. She said she was confused when she saw that Carver had upgraded his amount of mail storage.
“Initially, upgrading your storage was an April Fool’s joke,” Kervenik said. “You know how we always do something on April 1st? In 2008, we added that option as kind of subtle thing. No one really took notice, so we left it there as an in-joke here at headquarters.”
“I kind of feel bad now,” she added. “I hope he’s using a stolen credit card to pay for it.”
Carver said he was grateful Google had added the option, even if it was a joke. He used the Hoover Dam as an analogy.
“You know how the Hoover Dam is the only thing stopping Las Vegas from being flooded?” he said. “That’s what this is like. Extra storage is going to stop me from drowning in emails.”
At the time of print, Darver had reportedly used .00013% of his storage space.
