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Part of the reason everyone switched to GMail is because, unlike the other free online mail providers, they didn't do this kind of bullshit.

• asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  Maybe? It certainly wasn't why I switched. The gmail interface was so much cooler and faster than any of the other providers, and gmail's spam detection actually worked. The amount of storage available was nice, but I certainly gave no thought to the notion that Google would preserve my stuff indefinitely if I didn't use it.
• laumars 6y ago
  Really? I don’t recall that being the motive of any of my mates who signed up (I was still happy with Yahoo Mail at that time so was a late arrival but had plenty of friends who switched early on, many in the beta stage). From what I recall most switched because it was new, prettier and backed by a, then, trendy brand. Those guys certainly didn’t think about retention periods because they were checking their mail regularly anyways.
• oh_sigh 6y ago
  People switched because in a time when mail providers were giving you 5-10MB of space, Google offered 1GB. And the spam filtering was way better than other offerings.
  • int_19h 6y ago
    Yes, and the reason why that was a breakthrough is because you no longer had to clean up your server-side inbox - you could just leave stuff there, and it'd always come up in search. It was this combo - enough storage to never delete anything, and search good enough to find things in the resulting heap - that made it so much better than all alternatives. And I distinctly remember Google emphasizing the storage / never-delete part of it in their ads and outreach. I very much doubt it would be actionable in any legal sense, but it's certainly a change of paradigm for them to do this.