
Dear Google, I Have More Than 10,000 Contacts - admp
http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2011/02/dear-google-i-have-more-than-10000-contacts.html
======
nanoanderson
This is the type of support response which is accepted by companies as "good
enough," because it recognizes that there is a problem and offers a
"solution."

Really, this is one of those non-apology apologies that is infuriating to
people with completely reasonable expectations. What is this nonsense of
asking the user to formally request a feature? They just _did_ request a
feature! If it needs to go into a system, the support person should do that
for them.

A better approach: actually apologize, give your explanation (or excuse), give
a timeline for a solution if possible.

Abbreviated example for this situation: "Very sorry, we understand why this
has caused confusion and problems… We set arbitrary limits to prevent outright
abuse, and made a mistake by not having a function to override in special
cases such as yours… I've forwarded your issue to our engineering dept., and I
will personally inform you when we've solved your problem." Is that really so
hard?

~~~
bdonlan
I would suspect the real reason is something along the lines of "We download
the entire contact list in JS in the client to do autocompletion, so if it
gets too big your browser runs out of memory and crashes." They might also be
storing the contacts database as a single row in their backend store. Either
way it's not necessarily as easy as a quick change in an upper limit, and the
number of users affected is likely to be quite small, so I wouldn't be
surprised if this wasn't exactly at the top of their priorities.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
$10 says that the support guy has no idea why it's not easy (or whether it's
easy), which is why he gave a completely generic non-answer. And even if it
isn't a top priority, the support guy should _definitely_ put it into the
system as a feature request, ideally with a link to the issue so the customer
_knows_ it was entered. This might as well have been an automated email:

 _Dear <customer>,

Unfortunately, we don't allow <feature requested>. If you'd like to see us do
<feature requested> in the future, please follow these instructions to request
it..._

~~~
nanoanderson
I'd presume you're right about the support guy not having all the knowledge
required for my hypothetical answer, but if it's not a live communication
(i.e. chat or phone), why not spend the time calling up someone who would
know?

~~~
mryall
Because support people deal with spurious and unimportant issues like this all
the time. They need to deal with them quickly so they can help people who have
real problems.

Imagine the number of people who try to test the limits of Google's software.
I'm sure they get thousands of issues every day with people who have
intentionally tried to hit the limits on size of inbox, number of emails,
length of search term, etc.

------
edw519
1971: Dear user, You cannot have more than 10,000 records. If we increased the
maximum in the data base schema, we'd have to modify half of our software.
Sorry, IT.

1981: Dear user, You cannot have more than 10,000 records. Our software vendor
set this limit and we don't have the source code. Sorry, IT.

1991: Dear user, You cannot have more than 10,000 records. We don't have
enough room in our budget for more hard disk. Sorry, IT.

2001: Dear user, You cannot have more than 10,000 records. Our network traffic
is so high that we had to set arbitrary limits. Sorry, IT.

2011: Dear user, You cannot have more than 10,000 records. The internet is
full. Sorry, Google.

[EDIT: Replaced "contacts" with "records" 5 times. The general case causes
less confusion. Thank you, juiceandjuice.]

~~~
mvalle
I fear that 1981 still applies today, and is indeed the case with Google.

~~~
Semiapies
I bet Google actually has access to its own code for Apps contacts.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
Having access to the code, and having the willingness to modify it, are
different things.

~~~
Semiapies
And yet both are different from "we don't have the source code", now aren't
they?

------
johnrob
This is where the 37 signals folks would politely say no. You can't please
every user, and something tells me that a majority of gmail users aren't
sporting a 10k contact list.

~~~
Groxx
The majority of Gmail users aren't _paying_ users either, nor are they paying
for a _business_ account. For the free / non-business accounts, yes, by all
means, put in an arbitrary limit. But that's actually pretty low for a
business - what if they have > 10k employees, much less external contacts?

~~~
sigzero
Any company with that many employees is not going to be using Gmail in the
first place.

~~~
bricestacey
Many schools use gmail and have well over 10k students. Northeastern for
example uses gmail and has over 15000 undergrads.

~~~
Groxx
I _wish_ my school would use Gmail. Then we might be able to actually _do_
things with our email :\

~~~
bricestacey
I agree. My school (UMass Boston) went with Windows Live for students.
Usually, I would commend outsourcing this sort of thing (especially at the
crossroads of government and academia), but now I can get a list of every
student's email by just clicking address book. It's a joke. Staff/faculty
email is managed locally with Exchange 2003.

------
peterwwillis
Do you actually contact 10,000 people in a way that's not spam? The answer is
obviously No. Nobody talks to 10,000 people.

What are you gonna do, spend five weeks calling the first 4,000 people? Send
2,500 text messages? CC 8,000 users on your annual Christmas Greeting e-mail?
How the hell would you even begin to sort through that many contacts using a
cell phone or a standard e-mail client?

It's Google. This company serves the general public and doesn't have the
resources to tailor its service to every asshole (or Executive) with
unrealistic expectations. Next time somebody asks for more than 10,000
contacts they should just flip him the bird.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Congressional respresentatives can easily have more than 10,000 'contacts.' It
would be interesting to see if Microsoft's Exchange server can handle more
than 10,000. Active Directory certainly can. So perhaps it would be a
competitive feature.

For this community however I would agree there is always a tension between the
80 - 90% solution and the outliers. If you have more business than you can
handle, supporting outliers seems like a waste of resources, the problem comes
when someone decides to support those outliers and builds a system that can
handle your customer base as well. That gives them the high ground
competitively.

From Google's perspective I suspect its not like they get enough revenue from
this whole Apps business to make it worth their while, it seems to be more of
a way to poke MS than a product. (But disclaimer time I use Google's app)

~~~
Semiapies
I don't think anyone in Congress runs their email off a Gmail account.

~~~
jorgem
Sarah used yahoo.

------
Duff
IMO, this is an area where 37signals has the right approach.

I run into things like this when we consolidate email systems. Its always a
battle.

Weird corner cases like the guy who has 50,000 folders in his inbox, cross
referenced with multiple copies of messages in folders. Then you have the guy
with 75,000 objects in his Inbox. Or the one with 120 GB of email dating back
20 (!) years who must have all mail on an online mailbox and cannot use
archiving.

At the end of the day, supporting the bizarro corner cases can impact your
ability to support the other 99% of the users.

To make it worse, in most cases, you are just on the receiving end of a power
trip or attention whoring episode anyway. So, if these people are peons, you
tell them to piss off. If they are bigshots, you waste money dealing with
their whims.

------
jschuur
The 37 Signals answer is a good immediate reaction, but there is some due
diligence that Google can do here, that can be used for longer term product
development, as well as a sanity check of the current state of their product:

* Review the original intent with the 10,000 limitation. Was it a precautionary measure that turned out to either be justified or incorrect? Was it a technical limitation that has since gone away with DB, browser or bandwidth improvements?

* Ask the customer about their usage patterns. Can they be served with an alternate, existing product (LDAP, mailing lists, Google Docs spreadsheets)?

* Run some stats on a sample user base and project what percentage of other users will hit this limit at what point.

* Is there an opportunity to develop a new product, not for this user in particular, but something that uses contacts in a different way for those users who have a legitimate need for this many 'contacts' (large mailing list support within Gmail)?

* Start logging the number of users with this complaint internally, so that demand can be measured even if the user doesn't file a feature request.

Regardless of whether you personally think someone can maintain 10,000
relationships (they certainly can't), you can always learn from the unexpected
ways other people use your product, and figure out a way to either improve it
or create a separate product that can interact with it.

------
mgrouchy
Is this actually a problem for more people then this guy?

I literally don't know anyone who has 10000 contacts, I also don't know anyone
who actually needs 10000 contacts.

~~~
ry0ohki
Considering Google automatically adds anyone I have an email conversation with
to my contacts, I would say one day we will all get to this point, some just
sooner then others. And I can think of nothing more painful then trying to
prune through 10,000 contacts to figure out which ones I'd want to keep.

~~~
mgrouchy
Maybe? I have been basically living in gmail since the start of the beta and I
have < 500 contacts and I have never deleted a contact and use my email very
heavily.

I'm sure in 5+ years I may get to this point, but in a year or 2 or 5, who
says what this arbitrary upper limit is. Google seems to increase capacity on
just about everything else, I dont see why this would be different.

~~~
avar
I just checked and I have 2500 contacts just my virtue of using GMail for
mailing list. I probably care about less than 100 of those.

There's things like contacts for every Debian and CPAN bug I've ever filed,
contacts for people who change their E-Mail address every day due to using
some wildcard catch + script to generate them etc.

------
ghc
It bothers the computer scientist in me that they set an artificial number as
a contact limit. 2^16? Okay, they made a design decision that is problematic.
But 10000? Obviously someone set an arbitrary limit based on their expert
opinion about the number of contacts a person might need.

I am shocked that the "expert" was wrong.

~~~
patrickaljord
> Obviously someone set an arbitrary limit based on their expert

Google is known to based their decisions on actual data, they probably noticed
that most people were below eg 500 contacts and 99.9% below 9000 (or such) and
decided that 10000 would be safe.

~~~
tnorthcutt
_decided that 10000 would be safe_

aka, an arbitrary limit, rather than a specific technical limit.

~~~
random42
No, Its not _arbitrary_. In the above mentioned scenario, the decision is
based on actual data points of the current system, with possible growth
projections, and a _judgement_ call from business perspective. Hardly
arbitrary.

~~~
kenjackson
MS did the same thing with Live Mesh. Noticed that few people were using more
than 2GB, so they cut the limit to 2GB.

Both of these seem like odd decisions. The people using more than your data
driven limit are likely power users -- who are also probably your best
evangelists.

Furthermore, given that so few are using beyond the limit, unless there is a
technical reason to set the data driven limit, you incur virtually no cost to
keep the limit high. In fact it argues that increasing it to unheard of
numbers, ala gmail back in the day, makes more sense.

Again, there may be some technical reason they did this, which is fine. But if
they looked at their data and saw that only 1% of their users had more than
10000 contacts, then they deserve to lose all those customers, plus the full
wrath and bitterness they have as a result. They made a calculated decision to
explicitly screw you over.

------
eggbrain
Can anyone explain why there would be a limit to contacts? My best guess was
to prevent spam: 10,000 contacts is probably in the top 1% of users, but might
be much more heavily seen in bots.

Side note: Gmail offers a "Most Contacted" feature to show you who you email
the most. It might be interesting if they had a "Least Contacted" feature as
well, to be able to easily remove contacts you never use.

~~~
tomjen3
Because it is based on BigTable and it has certain limitations designed to
make it easier to implement, including a limit on how many elements one can
return.

Also, 10k contacts is properly far more than most people would ever have so it
is not a big deal.

~~~
acgourley
Until high profile people write public complaints that hit #1 on hacker news.

~~~
moe
Which is gonna shake google up exactly how?

99,999% of their users will never see the story. And the rest of us will have
forgotten about it before the end of the week.

~~~
Semiapies
And the handful of people who ever face this problem will move on to some
other solution.

------
run4yourlives
Dear User: You are an exception that it would cost more to support than not
to. Sorry, find something else.

------
alain94040
Dear Brad,

You need a CRM tool. Have you looked into SalesForce? It's online, just like
Google Apps.

------
pcolton
Alternatively, you can create a second gmail account to 'archive' your least
used contacts, and your primary account for your most used. I do this for
archived email as well, for example.

------
strmpnk
I call hoarding. I hope he isn't trying to actually mail 10k people from his
gmail account. Use a real ESP or CRM tool if you need that volume.

~~~
salemh
Refer to the original article stating the auto-adding by Google of emails Into
contacts. As well as (for other comments above) that an employee of Google
(not the main articles more..generic support response ticket email) is
"working on a solution."

------
jsdalton
FWIW, Highrise also sets seemingly "arbitrary" limits to the number of
contacts you can have in an account: <http://highrisehq.com/signup>

I guess both Google and 37signals do it because it's just a quick and dirty
way to manage resources. There maybe be other reasons that we're not aware of
though (e.g. people using more than that number of contacts might frequently
be using the app for nefarious purposes?).

It's a shame because limitations like these ultimately place limits on your
creativity. In the case of Highrise for example, I once had an idea to use it
to manage and track communications for all of my applications users, but
obviously that doesn't work if there are hard limits there.

Not sure I have a moral to my little story, except that arbitrary limits are
understandable, but frustrating and unfortunate.

~~~
dasil003
Creativity _comes_ from limits.

~~~
jsdalton
That's a rather facile response. Is that what Google should say to the guy who
is complaining in the article?

"Oh, you need more than 10,000 contacts? Well, why don't you just find a
creative solution to the problem instead. Creativity comes from limits!"

Trust me, I'm sure this guy _will_ find a creative solution to his problem,
just as I ended up finding a creative solution to my own problem.

But I'd be extremely wary as a developer of presuming to know more about your
customer's problem space than they do, and that all they need is a little dash
of creative thinking to get around whatever limitation your software may have
presented them with.

~~~
dasil003
I apologize for being so oblique, but I wasn't responding to the article,
merely the line:

> _It's a shame because limitations like these ultimately place limits on your
> creativity._

I understand what you mean, but this statement still bothers me. Needing more
than 10,000 contacts may be a requirement for many reasons, but creativity
does not seem like one of them to me.

~~~
jsdalton
Gotcha. I likewise think I now better understand where you were coming from in
your comment. "Creativity" was probably a poor word choice on my part --
perhaps "capabilities" would have been better, as in, "It's a shame because
limitations like these ultimately place limits on what the software is capable
of doing."

------
zdw
"Dear Google, I need a CRM System"

------
fjabre
I ran into this issue as well. A lot of Googlers read this board.. Any one of
them care to chime in?

EDIT: It's worth noting that loading near the 10k limit into your Google
Contacts kills your browser. The current UI setup is probably one of the
issues with having over 10k contacts.

------
kqueue
Yet another loud and obnoxious user.

------
Semiapies
So, an annoyed blog entry by the sort of petulant user who bitches to his IT
guy when a web-application run by another company says "You're over your
limit."

No indication that they're paying for anything, just whining about the limits
of a free contact system.

ETA: Fair enough, he does have some sort of enterprise support.

Mind you, this post sure has a lot of search-baiting links (like _every
single_ instance of the string "Google Apps", even in quoted blocks) pointed
at other blog entries.

Dude, enjoy your 10K contact limit and your plummeting search ranking.

------
URSpider94
I'm really surprised at how many people are jumping to discredit the poster's
legitimate need for more than 10k contacts. This is toxic thinking for a
technical entrepreneur, to assume that any use case outside your original
design is either pathological or caused by user error.

Smart developers crave this kind of feedback, so that they can figure out
where their assumptions about user behavior are wrong and work to correct
them.

------
deltaqueue
I believe someone already mentioned it, but Gmail used to (by default) add all
people you communicated with to your contact list. I didn't start using my
Gmail contacts list effectively until 2010 (when I got Android), so I ended up
cleaning out something like 6k contacts I accumulated over the past 5 years.

This guy doesn't need 10k contacts--he just doesn't want to go through and
remove the non-essentials.

------
duck
At a certain point you need to have something more than Gmail to handle that
many contacts, like a CRM type application.

------
drm237
A classic Rolodex holds about 400 cards. So he's at 25 Rolodexes. That would
be a sight to see sitting on a desk!

------
erikpukinskis
It's funny that everyone on this thread is like "No one needs more then 10,000
contacts! Spammer!" when Highrise's _medium-sized_ acccount has 20k. Their big
account has 30k. Only their intro plan has less than 10k.

<http://highrisehq.com/signup>

------
harryf
Wonder whether the Google Apps has it's own profit and loss as the bottom
line? The response is suggestive of Google Apps team being funded by ad
revenue and not really having to care too much winning and keeping it's own
customers. Can anyone shed insight?

------
est
Dear Google, I stared more than 60 projects on Google Code.

------
nomad_man
So, are you a paying customer? This seems very unthoughtful of them. Actually
i was considering evaluating them for enterprise use, looks like i will have
to postpone the evaluation.

~~~
tlack
It does seem to have a lot of weird artificial limits around the edge that no
amount of begging or paying will ever change.

I know people are saying stuff like this doesn't matter, but I manage at least
15 domains on GDomains now, and I will probably hesitate a bit before adding
another. Can I trust Google Domains to grow as my business does? I can't
believe you can't pay for more space..

~~~
catch23
I guess you'll have to find a new place for email when your business grows
beyond 10,000 employees...

When you have 10,000 employees, you could probably just get a team to author
their own version of gmail.

~~~
tlack
Are you talking about the limits in the linked article? It's 10,000 contacts
in the address book that are limited, not total employees - though that is
probably limited too.

------
clintboxe
Sounds like a humble brag to me.

------
haploid
I'm not even sure if I believe this.

10k works out to be 40 new contacts per business day( 5 days per week, 52
weeks minus 2 for vacation ) for a year. Let's assume this guy has been "at
it" for 4 years. That's still 10 new contacts every day.

Nobody who has actual work to do is going to contact, establish rapport,
communicate enough to know the contact would be valuable, and then most
importantly, _maintain the relationship_ with 10 NEW people every single
working day for 4 years straight.

~~~
kleinsch
I love how many of comments on this article have no idea who Brad Feld is, and
nobody bothered to read his bio before deciding he's a spammer. He's one of
the more famous tech entrepreneurs and investors. He's had companies acquired,
sits on the board of a bunch of big companies, and runs TechStars. Networking
is his job, and he's been doing it for over 20 years. If he wanted to run a
spam newsletter (which he has no reason to do), he has the resources to use
something way better than Gmail. ;)

~~~
Semiapies
"Famous" is a relative thing. You're the first person in a 75+ comment thread
to admit to knowing who he is.

~~~
erikpukinskis
I know who he is. But whether he's famous is immaterial. You all are assuming
that just because you can't imagine jobs that would require you to maintain a
database of 10k contacts that there are none.

~~~
Semiapies
Actually, the complaint is quite the opposite, that people are "unfairly"
assuming that he _is_ working in a set of jobs where such a database makes
sense.

------
jsavimbi
Maybe what Mr. Feld should've said is "First!" and yes, then moved on to
another solution, but they're paying $50/yr/user so I can see how a common
sense approach would probably solve this for the limited number of +10K
contact-having users.

That being said, I'm probably one of those 10K contacts and say what you will,
Brad has always responded to email and been a helpful resource to myself and
the community without asking for anything in exchange. Not exactly a contact
whore. Or a lightweight.

