Gmail now lets you insert up to 10GB of Google Drive files directly into an email
Google on Tuesday announced a new way to send files by further linking together its Gmail and Drive services. You can now directly insert files you host on Google Drive into an email on Gmail.
Context & Ripple Effects
Gmail's attachment ceiling has been a running constraint since Google doubled it to 20 MB back in 2007 — five years of incremental headroom while file sizes outgrew the pipe. The move announced today sidesteps that arithmetic entirely: instead of raising the byte limit again, Google routes the file through Drive and puts a pointer in the message.
The pickup was broad for a feature launch — the Gmail Blog announcement traveled same-day through The Verge, Mashable, BGR, ReadWrite, Geek.com, 9to5Google and Macgasm — which reflects how directly this ties two of Google's largest properties together. Email stops being the transport layer for big files and becomes the notification layer for files that live on Google's storage.
First-order effects
- Gmail users can now send files up to 10GB from within an email — roughly 500 times the old 20MB attachment cap — provided both sender and recipient are inside Google's ecosystem, since access rides on Drive permissions rather than the message itself.
Second-order effects
- Rival webmail providers face a bundling problem: Microsoft's Outlook.com and standalone storage players like Dropbox compete for the same 'send a big file' job, and Google just made its answer free and native to the world's largest webmail base.
Third-order effects
- If recipients need Drive accounts to open what arrives in their inbox, cloud storage shifts from optional add-on to de facto mail infrastructure — locking file-sharing behavior to whichever storage provider owns the sender's account.
The trend: Webmail is being repositioned as a front end for cloud storage, with the traditional attachment giving way to hosted-file pointers controlled by the provider's permission system.