It's taken us a while to say it, but gee, thanks, Gmail! Back when Google first announced that it was testing a new free email service that offered a full gigabyte of storage space, most people thought the company was either hatching an elaborate April Fool's joke or was totally stoned. But of course the company turned out to be dead serious (and only slightly stoned), and plenty of invitee beta testers are already blithely cramming their Gmail inboxes with attachments the size of Kansas, giddy with the sheer wantonness of it all.

Now, while we here at AtAT don't have any particular need for email accounts with such a gargantuan disk quota, it sure has been fun watching all the other email services scramble to upgrade their offerings to compete with the new free email storage yardstick (aka the "Gmail Gig")-- that is, all the other services not run by Apple. Because while Yahoo! upped its mail storage to 100 MB and Microsoft at least made sketchy promises (as yet unfulfilled-- surprise, surprise) to bump its Hotmail users up to 250 MB of breathing room, Apple has been almost suspiciously silent on the issue, as its .Mac customers watched their inboxes strain against those same old 15 MB confines. And remember, while Yahoo! and Hotmail have free offerings, .Mac costs its members at least a hundred bucks a year; granted, that fee gives users a lot more than an email account with Web access, but when it comes to playing the Who Gets What For How Much game, customers tend to ignore niceties like iLife integration and bookmark syncing-- and even accounting for 100 MB of iDisk storage, the price-vs.-capacity differential still looked pretty unfair.

Well, fear not, fellow .Mac members, because the Gmail Effect finally trickled down to us, too; faithful viewer Ken Drake was the first to inform us that .Mac mail storage has suddenly increased to a perfectly respectable 125 MB-- and iDisks have increased by 25% to the same. What's more, this "250 MB of combined iDisk and .Mac Mail storage" is user-assignable; simply visit your Account Settings and you can choose just how to divvy up that quarter-gig between Mail and your iDisk. Never use .Mac's included mail account? Throw most of that weight at your iDisk and post over twice as many iPhotos and iMovies as before. If you're a heavy email user instead and your iDisk is just "that sparkly blue icon in the Finder sidebar," give the lion's share to .Mac Mail and you can store more Windows worm attachments than you ever thought possible. Everybody wins!

Ah, but what about us poor saps who had just agreed to pay sixty extra clams per year to double our iDisk to 200 MB? Are we paying $160 a year for less storage than .Mac now includes for the basic $99.95 annual fee? Nope; when we peeked at our Account Settings, we were more than a little taken aback to see that we had 512 MB of space assigned to both our iDisk and our Mail account. (We got email from Apple saying that our total storage had been increased to 1.2 GB, but hey, close enough, we suppose.) Since that's a lot more storage than we need, we were able to downgrade back to standard service as of our renewal date in a week and a half, still get 35 MB more storage than we'd had previously, and save a wad of cash to boot. (For people who do want that "Gmail Gig" for their .Mac accounts, a combined and user-assignable gigabyte of storage is now available for a flat $49.95 annual surcharge.)

At least now we know why .Mac mail was screwed up with "quota overages" a couple of days ago, as noted by faithful viewer Drew: growing pains as Apple worked to implement the storage upgrade. Meanwhile, how about that timing, hmmm? Most original .Mac accounts are coming up for renewal within days, and the advent of Gmail had led to a lot of grumbling from members that they wouldn't re-up because of Apple's anemic storage limits. So will 250 MB of combined storage be enough to keep most .Mac members from jumping ship? We figure it'll help retain just about everyone except for the people who only use their accounts for .Mac email (who obviously can get a better deal elsewhere).

We'd say it kept us from bailing, but heck, we were going to stick around anyway; for our money, iDisk storage, iSync integration, and iPhoto-to-HomePage publishing are just too convenient to give up. And by the way, if .Mac's storage bump has persuaded any of you holdouts to sign up, tell us first so we can send you an invite, because if you join through us, we get a bribe kickback discount, dig?