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> Gmail takes a traditional approach to email management. Messages come in, you read them, maybe organize them with labels, then archive them, delete them, or j
by abraae 8y ago
> Gmail takes a traditional approach to email management. Messages come in, you read them, maybe organize them with labels, then archive them, delete them, or just leave them in your inbox forever.
Not that long ago, gmail was a radically new way to deal with email.
1) aggregating emails from a single conversation in your inbox - yes, on the old days, every incoming email was a line in your inbox.
2) providing archive functionality - no need to organise and file your old emails, just click archive and use the search later if you find you'll need them
- kevstev 8y agoYou forgot 3- a search function that worked well and instantaneously. and you kind of covered it, but just to make it explicit- provided what was practically unlimited storage for the time- 2GB. Competitors were offering 5, maybe 10MB. I remember people hacking together a file system out of it because that was so astoundingly large for the time. The fact that gmail is now taken for granted is quite interesting though, it really was astoundingly revolutionary at the time and really built the halo image around Google.
- rixed 8y agoIIRC gmail was also the first popular mail reader to use tags rather that folders to classify emails.
- Rattled 8y agoThreading in email clients has been around for decades. Actually I must check if there are mobile versions of mutt or elm.
- porker 8y agoAnd they thread properly. Unlike Gmail's bastardised 'We munge your subjects and think these are related'. I considered implementing the Mutt threading algorithm in a browser extension for GMail. It's one of those "If I ever have less to do, I'll give it a shot" ideas that will never get done :)
- krageon 8y ago> not that long ago GMail was new 14 years ago. I think that's a pretty long time no matter how old you are.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]