25,000 Contacts in Gmail????

OK, I love Gmail, the whole shebang, calendars, contacts, mail, chat etc etc.

Just through on my RSS is this:

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/store-up-to-25000-contacts.html

Gmail used to have a limit of 10,000 contacts. For most of us, this was way more than enough, but we heard from some of you who use Gmail to communicate with more than 10,000 people. 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.

I can't belive people have this many contacts, pretty insane!  I thought I had a lot at 250!

It goes on to say:

Also, 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.

Now that doesn't sound like a lot, but it is.  The old maximum, 10,000 at 32KB each totals 312.5MB, quite a lot really.  The new maximum, 25,000 at 128KB each totals just over 3GB!!!!!!!!

I know that maybe a few people in the world would actually use anything like that, but crazy space Google must have for their free email service, very impressive.