As a result of this, we built http://www.findbigmail.com as a free service to identify large emails. It adds labels for big, very big and ultra big messages so you know what to delete first. Hopefully this can help some other people too. (And if it does, a donation will help to keep it running!).

I’d personally regard it as a major bug on Apple’s part if they don’t notify you in some way as you get close to this limit (though I am nowhere close to my limit, so I can’t speak from experience). Certainly what I’d hope they would do is a variety of things, from perhaps turning the mailbox icon red to throwing up dialogs once one gets to, say, 95% usage, and that they would do this across both OSX and iOS.

What a normal person should do at this point to deal with the issue is to submit a bug to bugreport.apple.com. People seem to feel this is pointless, but I report tons of bugs, and I get plenty of feedback from Apple asking me for details. The main thing to remember is that, usually, the bug is not going to be fixed and a new version released tomorrow. Best case it will be picked up in the next dot release, which happen every three months or so; and quite likely it will not be picked up until the next major release, which for 10.7 will be, your guess is as good as mine, September 2011?

Felix, of course, has a bully pulpit and there may be some value in writing a mea culpa post in which you both apologize to google (though perhaps the “your quota is low” email idea is a good one), and call Apple out for not warning the user. On the other hand can you even be sure that any of the relevant Apple engineers even read Felix? Apple is not a monolithic borg, and just because some guy in Time Machine team reads Felix and learns about this bug doesn’t mean that guy even knows anyone on the Mail.app team to tell about what he saw. Certainly submitting to bugreport.apple.com is the most reliable way to get the problem resolved.

Also, your implication that they laid a trap for you in order to make money is I think misguided. The number of users who reach the limit is very small — the policy is a defense against excessive use, not a bank-style surprise fee.

Re: gmail as beta s/w: they’ve been out of Beta for a year.

I use Google Apps and I scrub my own inbox every quarter. The highest my inbox has ever been was 10mb (all text email, no attachments. I hate attachments). Every quarter I delete old, non-important email. Move important email off Google servers to my own file server in an archive folder. I rarely go back and view archived important emails, just keep them as references. Theres nothing like starting a new quarter with a tidy, empty inbox.

The paid enterprise version of Google Apps I would not have a problem leaving ALL my emails on the servers. Google has stated, Enterprise customers get more space (25g) so users never have to delete any emails. No emails will be deleted if you use Google Enterprise Apps. I like that idea and it’s the only reason I would upgrade to Enterprise. Like you I understand the importance of archiving my messages in one locations but I just can’t trust doing that using free Gmail/Apps.

If you don’t want to run out of space, download and archive your e-mail. It’s a free service – there are many good reasons to criticize Google, but your first world problem in this case is certainly not one of them.

Also, when important e-mails are returned, most of us resend them or find other ways of contacting the individual in question.

Jim

Not to be a dick, but if they’re important the sender will resend, and if the sender doesn’t resend they aren’t that important. Deep breaths.

You’re in a very rare situation, as someone near the limit who doesn’t use the browser. Its not surprising that a free product wasn’t optimally set up for your situation – especially since you’re among the most expensive gmail customers (you miss the ads but max out the space you use).