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How Gmail Happened (2014)
- dang 8y agoDiscussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7506270 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7506270
- smnrchrds 8y agoThe top comments on that thread discuss the importance of owning your email address by way of using a custom domain, so you can move to a new providers and not worry about losing contacts or missing emails. I fully agree with that. Back in 2014, both Outlook and Gmail had free family plans with custom domain capability, but have since removed those options. Is there a good low-cost option for custom domain email in 2019? For people who use and rely on email a lot, Fastmail is definitely the best option, but it is too expensive for my use case. I would like to set up custom domains for my family (5-10 people in total) and I would like to know what is the cost-effective best practice to do so these days.
- lotsofpulp 8y agohttps://www.migadu.com/en/index.html https://www.migadu.com/en/index.html
- smnrchrds 8y agoThis seems to be a good solution. Have you used it yourself? How has your experience been with migadu?
- derekp7 8y agoOne option would be to set up a micro VM at AWS, or Digital Ocean, etc. to host your mail server, with something like Squirrel Mail. Then set up your gmail account to allow forwarding for your other email address ("send mail as" in Settings / Accounts and Import), so that outbound mail from your private server can be forwarded through Google's servers (so you don't get blocked by everyone else). This way, if Google mail goes away, you can pick up another free email provider to relay mail through in the future (assuming everyone else also allows "send mail as").
- hiei 8y agoIs this how your email workflow is setup?
- perakojotgenije 8y agomailbox.org - it allows you to have up to 25 aliases so you can use it with multiple domains
- bluedino 8y agoJust about all of the big hosting companies will do email hosting. Everywhere from $2/month to $15/monht (including office 365) you don't even need to buy your domain from them.
- hc8bn1 8y agoYandex is free for your own domain. Not sure how many mailboxes it supports.
- frosted-flakes 8y agoZoho has free custom domains. I don't use the web client much, but it's actually pretty good.
- tyingq 8y agoYandex email is free, even if you want to bring your own domain. https://connect.yandex.com/pdd/ https://connect.yandex.com/pdd/
- leowoo91 8y agoBy staying in beta for 5 years
- sandworm101 8y agoI was just reading something about all the defunct and abandoned google projects. So now "How Gmail Happened" reads to me like gmail too is done and gone, something that happened in the past but is no longer happening. I guess that day will come eventually. Maybe tomorrow? I never know what google is thinking when it comes to cancellations.
- roneythomas6 8y agoNope that's never going to happen, Gmail is the cornerstone of G Suite. As of January 2017, G Suite has 4 million paying businesses, and 70 million G Suite for Education users.
- saghm 8y agoThat doesn't seem to preclude that it could become an enterprise-only product
- gumby 8y agoI see no reason to cancel it or not, but those numbers seem pretty small relative to google's general user base and revenue. I have no idea if or why they would cancel it or not, just saying that the numbers you gave seem like small potatoes. Then again Google really needs to show alternatives to advertising revenue (e.g. why Nest was brought onto Google's balance sheet).
- tomcam 8y agoNope. It’s now also a paid enterprise product (at consumer prices) so it probably pays for itself. I’ve been a customer since day 1 and think the $7/month or so it costs is ridiculously low. Also see this critically important comment regarding use of your own domain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19566056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19566056
- gdulli 8y agoLet's be honest, it's also a big way they build data on you and show you targeted ads so I'm sure it pays for itself without direct revenue.
- adzm 8y agoLet's not forget the Outlook web team who pretty much started the whole ajax/web2.0 thing in the first place with IXMLHttpRequest.
- telesilla 8y agoWhat was their initial impetus for this? I'm curious what functionality they were trying achieve.
- tomcam 8y agoInteractive web pages-exactly what it’s used for in GMail. It was given the name XMLHttpRequest because it was a last-minute addition and the only way to get a feature into Internet Explorer that late in the product cycle was to make it XML-related. Which it obviously wasn’t, but that was how to get it approved. Source: Was a Microsoft employee at the time, though not on the IE team.
- RandallBrown 8y agoBack then most APIs (that I used) were in XML. It definitely seemed XML related.
- asveikau 8y agoIt's funny how in those days XML was also short hand for "make way guys, this is the future". I thought it was a really overhyped and ugly way to represent data, but this did not seem like a popular thing to express. In retrospect, standardizing on something was probably a good thing for the time though.
- jimmaswell 8y agoI still think XML gets an unfair rap. -Perfectly readable to me, works fine with auto-collapse. Closing tag is complained about but it helps you keep track of what you're reading. -Cleaner than "simpler" serialization formats in many cases, like putting type information in an attribute instead of something hacky like giving your json object a $type member. Ran into this myself serializing objects in an array of BaseClass where the class of the objects mattered, had to turn on a flag in the JSON library. -Extensible when you need it, as the X stands for. As in the prior case, mapping extensions onto more rudimentary formats becomes hacky and less readable. Obviously it's going to be easier to use JSON et al in some contexts but I never felt anything was inherently wrong with XML. XML is still probably more appropriate if you're storing a lot of metadata to your objects and you're not in a context like web dev where only other formats are treated as first-class. There are some things I don't like about JSON. It's supposed to be easy for JS users because it's literally "JavaScript Object Notation" but it has annoying differences like requiring quotation marks around variable names and disallowing // comments. Not intuitive at all.
- alfonsodev 8y agoFor all people involved in side projects, this quote is something to remember. >"One of the lessons I learned from that was just in terms of my own psychology, that it was important that I always have a working product. The first thing I do on day one is build something useful, then just keep improving it."
- scruffyherder 8y agoThe bigger question to me is why did everyone suddenly change to using their real names when gmail invites were no longer a thing and it opened up?
- soylentcola 8y agoCan't speak for anyone else, but I remember trying to snag a funny or hard-to-get name during the invite period but they were all taken. For a short time I used my common "screen name" of the time but soon after switched to my.name@gmail.com. I was in my mid-late 20's and If I'm being honest with myself, I think I looked at Gmail as the webmail provider that more "savvy" or professional people used. I wanted something I could use for both personal stuff and professional contacts so the old silly_forum_name@yahoo.com wouldn't cut it. Later on this would shift to using my own domain to express professionalism but I still have my first.last@gmail address as the account all of my friends and family use.