If you are one of the millions who is a Google Gmail user you will be pleased to hear that Google has announced they will continue to add more storage. In a post by engineer Rob Siemborski on the Gmail blog, he indicated that Google will continue to make good on its promise to add more storage space while at the same time speed up the counter on the login page that keeps track of the amount of storage space.

The increased storage space required by users comes as no surprise, since the size of file attachments continues to grow and that increases the amount of storage space that users need. Google starting adding additional storage for users in April 2005 and this has made Gmail very popular.

Rival free Email services from Microsoft and Yahoo have responded, as well, with Hotmail upping their limit to 5GB in August and Yahoo offering “unlimited” storage in May. Google, which has been capped at less than 3GB per user, is just trying to keep up.

All of this storage, however, really just begs two questions: why don’t people clean out their Gmail boxes periodically and how much of the Gmail being stored is just nothing more than Spam? While it is true that no matter how much disk space is offered some users will always want more, how much space could be saved by a little proactive housekeeping?

We applaud Google’s efforts to keep up with demand, but one has to wonder if this isn’t a sign of an expensive trend that is going to lead to users with high volume storage requirements having to pay for that additional storage. As far as we know no one is offering free storage equipment to Google, and it must be costing Google a small fortune to continue to add additional storage. Can Gmail be providing enough revenue to make it worth adding more and more disk storage? Only time will tell where this will lead, but one thing is for sure, some simple house cleaning is in order for users who are archiving over 3GB in their Gmail accounts.