I'm just curious as to how much more data is required on the server to hold 500 messages as opposed to 50 messages. Is it that much more that it needs to be restricted due to higher server costs?
It has a little bit to do with cost and a lot to do with long-term scalability, efficiency, and practicality. GTPlanet is backed up with CDP, or
continuous data protection to an off-site data center in another part of the country. This is
very expensive, and I'm charged per GB of space that's backed up.
I don't mind the costs of backing up public data, of course - it's like insurance. Private messages are a different story, however, as they're rarely read a second time and they'll never be seen again by anyone else - essentially worthless overhead in the database. Even with the size limitations, there's currently over 367,000 private messages stored on GTPlanet. Without the limits, there could easily be over 1 or 2 million messages accumulated in the past 10 years, which would be a very serious problem.
Regardless, inbox size is somewhat of a moot point as you can easily download your private messages in various formats (see the links at the bottom of your Inbox page). I receive dozens of messages per day and reach the cap quickly. When that happens, I just download them in TXT format and email the file to myself in Gmail. Since Gmail searches text within TXT file attachments, all of my old private messages on the site are permanently archived and searchable. If you're a heavy PM user, I recommend developing a similar system, or storing your old PM backups in a folder on your computer if you expect a need to reference them later.
