Google's Gmail capacity goes beyond 5 GB

Mountain View (CA) - Google’s free e-mail service now offers over 5,000 megabytes worth of storage capacity, further classifying itself as the most ambitious service of its kind.

Since its first-year anniversary, Google has continuously increased the storage space of individual Gmail accounts. There is a live ticker on Gmail.com that shows the capacity increasing literally every second.

Early Saturday afternoon, that number passed five gigabytes, a five-fold increase over the e-mail service’s initial offering when it launched back in 2004.

As of this morning, the running total was around 5,050 megabytes. That’s enough space for more than half a million e-mails.

Though it was fairly easy for users to receive an invitation to open one previously, Google just started allowing users to create their own accounts earlier this year. Media reports have speculated that around 50 million Gmail accounts have been opened in the past three years.