BTW,
http://www.thinkgeek.com/ has some prank products on their top page.
Not the "free" t-shirt, apparently. It does indeed say something appropriate for today.
The 1GB 'limit' is actually not that impressive. About 1.5TB could be arranged in a RAID configuration WITH a hot spare for less than around $2000.
I have four years of email history, including some fat attachments sitting in my local mail folders, and that adds up to only 200MB.
That would support about 7500 users, as most people will never, ever accumulate a gigabyte of email. A lot of people simply delete as they go.
Applying some compression, the email could consume even less space. Call it (conservatively) 15000 users for about $3,000 worth of equipment. One rackmount chassis, system with one RAID controller, eight 250GB SATA drives, and one small portion of a big, fat internet pipeline would handle 15,000 users at this sort of capacity very comfortably. Further savings in the form of "identical" email attachments being reference counted and stored seperately would also be possible.
Targeted web based advertising (which they already have the infrastructure to handle trivially) to 15,000 people would probably pay for that hardware in a few months.
In other words: yes, it could be done.
If they throw in spam eatin' (and given their work with a search engine, and the analysis of the text content, spam eatin' should be trivial), I might go for it.
They already provide google accounts with newsgroup access, after all.
