GMail boosts contact list to 25k entries

In what may be seen as a boon for heavy users of social networks, search giant Google is bumping up its free GMail service with a roomier contact list that lets them save up to 25,000 contacts. Google software engineer Mike Helmick said this was more than double the earlier contact limit of 10,000 for its free email service. "We want you to be able to store all of your contacts in a single place, so starting today, we’ve increased the limit for all Gmail users, including all those of you who use Google Apps, to 25,000 contacts," Helmick said in a blog post. He said that the move stemmed from some Gmail users who use Gmail "to communicate with more than 10,000 people." Gmail, which started in 2004, initially attracted users by bumping up its storage space to up to 7 gigabytes of storage. Helmick also said that Gmail's expanded contacts manager now allows more information to be stored on an individual contact entry. "Previously an individual contact could be no larger than 32KB — big enough for most people, but not always sufficient for those who like to keep a lot of notes on individual contacts. Now, each contact may be up to 128KB in size, allowing you to store more information in the notes field," Helmick explains. — TJD, GMA News