Much has been made of Google's new email service, Gmail, which promises a gigabyte of free storage. Although true paranoids have already rejected the service for important reasons, many are excited at the idea of getting all that free storage space.

But will you really be getting as much as you think?

According to the Gmail FAQ, that 1 gigabyte is actually 1,000 megabytes (and presumably by megabyte they mean 1,000,000 bytes -- otherwise, this way madness lies). Consider: if the current mailbox on your computer is reported by your OS as having an even 100 megabytes in it, you might naively think you could store ten times that on a Gmail account. Unfortunately, you would be wrong by 48,576,000 bytes (about 46 megabytes by your OS's reckoning -- quite a lot of email).

This is the sort of confusion and sneaky business practices that results when the kibioctet standard is not in wide use, as it should be.

To address this issue, as well as others, ZPi is proud to announce ZPiMail. Unlike Gmail, ZPiMail offers infinite gibioctets of storage space by leveraging the transcendental irrationality of nature itself:

Every email you have stored can be expressed as a mere string of digits (in fact, it's already stored as such on your computer). Since the number π has an infinite number of essentially random digits, the string of digits that represents one of your emails can be found within it, as can the digits representing your entire mailbox, no matter how large it may be. Instead of storing all those gibioctets of digits on your computer, why not just store the offset of the expansion of π that matches them? With ZPiMail, now you can!

(NOTE: ZPi does not currently offer software to facilitate reading your email from π, however you can rest assured that everything in your mailbox is already safely stowed away in there, as well as any future email you may receive and hypothetical emails to you from Jimmy Carter explaining all the mysteries of universe in Farsi. I apologize for this oversight, but I have been forced to prematurely announce ZPiMail in order to head off my archnemesis, Dr. Ernesto, who is attempting to steal focus with his derivative EeMail.)