Google's GMail... 1 GB Mail Storage... true?

A story has ran today (the 31st) about Google launching a new service, GMail, that allows 1 Gb storage, search functionality, and alike... soon. Sounds like a nice April Fools joke...

Yet, a lot of news sources have ran stores on it, and these news sources don't commonly run April Fools jokes.

http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5182805.html
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/03/31/google.email.ap/
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/01/technology/01google.html

So, what do you think, April Fools or factual story? If factual, what do you think?

It's a great idea. 1 GB of online space. Too bad it's only email. Otherwise I know where I would be storing hard drive images.

It's kinda gimicky if you think about it. I'm sure the mail server won't be able to parse any email larger then 20? 30? 100? MB?

Unless ... you use RAR to break up the files and then have a utility that will sit there and email them one by one. Hmmm, that would be cool.

No way they are going to offer 1gig of space... Can you even start to imaging how much that would end up being?

Hmm but cant companies get in the **** for saying things like that? even if it is a april fools?

Even if you offer 1GB of storage, how many users will actually use all 1GB of it? The average webmailer will maybe use 10% of that at the most.

I think basically what they are saying is that they will not be putting daft limits on mailbox size. For example, my hotmail inbox is always at >90% of capacity and I dont really have much stuff at all in my inbox.

It's a good idea but think about it, if there are thousands of people with accounts... that's terabytes or space for free! that just doesn't seem right. Unless they end up selling your email to spammers, now large viruses will have even more power.