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Gmail. Using web-based email clients was a nightmare before Gmail. They had limited storage space, and the UX was pretty bad, they were hard to search, etc. Yo
by jakevoytko 6y ago
Gmail.
Using web-based email clients was a nightmare before Gmail. They had limited storage space, and the UX was pretty bad, they were hard to search, etc. You spent all your time figuring out what you wanted to delete, or seeing your emails bounce when people had full inboxes. If you didn't log in for a while, your account would disappear.
And then suddenly, you got a GB of storage. For free. No questions asked. And its UI was simple and easy-to-use. And you could search it.
A lot of other products are 10x better in individual areas. For instance, Google Sheets was much more portable/shareable than Excel when it launched. But even today there's no comparison, Excel is superior for actual spreadsheet functionality. But Gmail was better on every axis, even against local clients like Thunderbird and Outlook.
- apohn 6y agoGmail also automatically saved drafts. I can't tell you how many long emails I wrote and lost before hitting the send button with other web email UIs. Gmail was not just 10x. I think it redefined what a good web based email experience could be. I think it completely changed what people realized and expected the web browser could be from an interactivity standpoint.
- mtmail 6y ago> or seeing your emails bounce when people had full inboxes. For those who don't remember: That was around the time when Yahoo offered 6MB, some others only 2MB.
- wlesieutre 6y agoFound this CNET article: https://www.cnet.com/news/google-to-offer-gigabyte-of-free-e-mail/ https://www.cnet.com/news/google-to-offer-gigabyte-of-free-e... They say 2 MB Hotmail, 4 MB Yahoo. Gmail went straight to a gigabyte.
- ajuc 6y agoIt was so crazy people wrote code to use gmail as a network drive.
- follower 6y agoAh, those were the days... ;) http://web.archive.org/web/20070708004553/http://richard.jones.name/google-hacks/gmail-filesystem/gmail-filesystem.html http://web.archive.org/web/20070708004553/http://richard.jon... http://libgmail.sourceforge.net http://libgmail.sourceforge.net https://pramode.net/articles/lfy/fuse/pramode.html/ https://pramode.net/articles/lfy/fuse/pramode.html/
- bombcar 6y agoToday a single email without attachments can get close to those numbers!
- hanniabu 6y agoHow many emails was that back then?
- shmoe 6y agoSeems ancient at this point, but a total game changer at the time. I can actually recall getting my invite in 2006.
- listenallyall 6y agoI bought invites on eBay for myself and a few family members. Maybe $5 each. Although I thought it was closer to 2004.
- apples_oranges 6y agoAgreed. Too bad it seems that email's best days are over now, as email nowadays is mostly for notifications.
- jasode 6y ago>Too bad it seems that email's best days are over now, as email nowadays is mostly for notifications. Email is still heavily used for business-to-business communication between humans. Talking about business matters is still more natural via email until the participants know each other well enough to switch to texting. But yes, for personal communication, friends & family have shifted from email to phone texts. E.g. my friend who graduated from college in 1990s used to communicate with his parents with 100% email but now it's 100% text messaging. Email is too much friction for personal comms.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Nextgrid 6y ago"Notifications" is being generous here. The average user's email inbox is 90% marketing spam.
- KMnO4 6y agoAny sources on that? I’m guessing the 90% is hyperbole, but I still wonder how much spam the average user actually gets. (For me, close to absolute zero)
- Nextgrid 6y agoPretty much every company/service out there opts you into spam unless you proactively opt-out of it (which takes effort and knowledge to work around the dark patterns). Looking at my password manager I've got ~260 logins right now and keep in mind that I don't do social media and try to avoid creating accounts as much as possible (and delete the ones I don't use for a long time), so the average user is likely to have a lot more accounts. Even if each one of these companies only spammed once a week (most will do more frequently if you let them), that'll already significantly outnumber the amount of legitimate e-mail I receive.
- deliriousferret 6y agoWas Gmail really 10x better than Hotmail?
- apohn 6y agoGmail was 100x Hotmail, if not even more than that. I think anybody who was on Yahoo Mail/Hotmail (or even something like Roundcube) who switched to Gmail probably realized how much these other companies had been holding stuff back. I've never cared for invite only stuff, but Gmail really was a total revolution when it came out.
- mcculley 6y agoI thought the “invite only” approach was clever. It throttled growth so they could maintain a good user experience and limited automated use by spammers.
- wlesieutre 6y agoIn terms of mailbox space, it was 500x Hotmail. Before Gmail you had to delete your old emails because if your mailbox was full it would stop receiving. The whole approach of "archive" and being able to search your entire email history from any computer in a webmail interface came from Google. There was POP3 before this of course, to keep all your mail locally and empty out the server box. But that only works if you have a single computer that you check mail from. Even back in 2004 when Gmail launched that was a non-starter for me, I had email at home and at school.
- dopidop 6y agoLong story short, yes.
- roadbeats 6y agoHotmail was 10x worse than all alternatives. It was an ugly web page, not an app. Gmail took XMLHttpRequest and its ActiveX fallback (we used to call this “comet”) and proved the world that we can ship a robust app inside a web browser. It was well designed, had no ugly banners like Hotmail did, it was really fast, simple and working like a desktop app.
- macNchz 6y agoGmail was amazing when it launched...I was so excited to get an invite from a friend during the beta period. It made the crappy POP sync for my ISP email account look like a joke. Funny thing is–closing in on 20 years later–I dislike the latest generation of Gmail's web interface so much that I'm back to using a desktop email client.
- smaryjerry 6y agoI dislike it so much out of the box, or with a new account. When I help older people they look at Google like it is in hieroglyphics that they can’t understand because everything is an icon instead of a word. Then there’s the by default sorting your mail box for you and also having threaded emails. Features that have good intentions but just make it impossible to find the emails you are searching for.
- jasode 6y ago>And then suddenly, you got a GB of storage. For free. No questions asked. And its UI was simple and easy-to-use. And you could search it. Also don't forget that Gmail at the time had the most intelligent spam blocking algorithm compared to AOL/Yahoo/Hotmail/etc. It was a big enough deal that some observers that switched to Gmail considered the email spam problem as "solved" because Gmail seemed so good at it. (On the other hand, many independent people trying to run their own SMTP servers think that Gmail is too aggressive with spam filtering because it also blocks many legitimate senders with low/unknown reputation.)
- mike_h 6y agoIs there a better spam filter today?
- selcuka 6y agoDefine better. Gmail does a pretty good job for most use cases but it's all about compromises. One person's spam is another's ham; so you will unavoidably end up with false positives and/or false negatives. For some organisations you might want a system that you can fine tune those.
- flemhans 6y agoFunnily enough, Gmail can be on the receiving end sometimes too, e.g. being blocked in SORBS. The response was: 451 Currently Sending Spam See: http://www.sorbs.net/lookup.shtml?209.85.215.41 Although some may argue that SORBS is a bad system, anyway.
- narrator 6y agoI studied Google's file system. What Google figured out is that, with the rise of very fast networking such as 10 Gig Ethernet and faster, the network is much faster than local disk. Files were spread across multiple servers so they could all stream different parts of the file off their local disks simultaneously to the client computer faster than the local disk on any one computer could run. Thus, you could have systems like Gmail that could run much faster than even local disk based email clients, even with thousands of users. Other providers were probably using expensive NASs with huge profit margins built in. Google was using thousands of the cheapest crappiest commodity parts because it was all triple redundant... and it worked faster because the network was really fast and multiple computers could stream different parts of the same file to clients.
- robotresearcher 6y agohttps://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/gfs-sosp2003.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... Very, very influential reading back in the day, and still interesting.
- qw3rty01 6y agoIt also came out at an interesting time, because everyone was trying to push data-to-redundancy ratios to their limits. Since storage was so expensive back then, storing multiple copies of data made little sense when looking at it from a data storage view, even if the speeds were much better Then Google dropped their MapReduce paper: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/mapreduce-osdi04.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... Which quite literally paved the way for modern data processing, and works extremely well with the Google Filesystem architecture
- datavirtue 6y agoYeah, and then everyone took hadoop and threw it on a NAS or they provision it in the cloud and...throw it on a NAS. Always scratched my head on that one.
- anderspitman 6y agoNot just a GB. It was also constantly increasing in size, with a live counter to show how much storage you had available. Super gimmicky, but fun. I guess there are probably a lot of people here who are too young to have ever used those early versions. You also had to scrounge forums for an invite code.
- jldl805 6y agoI made my account(s) off invite codes and have "just my last name" at gmail dot com as an address... it's one of my most prized possessions, to this day!
- Hrundi 6y agoI managed to snag my (very common) italian last name. I get a flood of messages every day. I both love and hate my account. I don't even speak italian!
- 12ian34 6y agodo you receive any interesting emails?
- jldl805 6y agoI get the same thing. My last name isn't that common though so I've messaged the culprits specifically (especially if they use their phone number when signing up for whatever it is) to ask them to please stop using it. Someone will have the idea and sign up for 5-6 things all in one burst, which usually inspires my outreach.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dopeboy 6y agoHanging out in IRC channels in early 2000s was how I wasted my teenage years. But I did get a gmail invite out of it leading to my primary email address to this day: arithmetic@gmail.com
- Franciscouzo 6y ago> If you didn't log in for a while, your account would disappear That's still true for gmail, but the time is more reasonable at two years.
- chrbr 6y agoThey announced it on April Fools. And it seemed like a joke - 1GB for email? Yeah. Right. Hotmail had, what, 10MB? 15? Best April Fools joke ever.
- inasio 6y agopretty sure Yahoo was 5MB and Hotmail 2MB when gmail came out.
- selcuka 6y agoThe Gmail web interface also (re)invented AJAX. The number of web applications that used XMLHttpRequest increased exponentially after the success of Gmail.
- slt2021 6y agoit was also written in Java which then compiled into client side javascript(!)
- cromwellian 6y agoNot the original version. The current version is a hybrid of code compiled from Java (J2CL, previously GWT) mostly business logic shared with Android, iOS, and the server backends, and a UI that is built with Closure Library. It's monolithically compiled and globally optimized via Closure Compiler.
- pdamoc 6y agoHotmail offered 2Mb space and Yahoo proudly claimed "twice the space of other providers" with their 4Mb offer. I had a GMX.de account that was providing 25 Mb and felt like a king. Then April 1, 2004 came and nothing was the same anymore.
- Jleagle 6y agoGmail was so good that when it was in beta i sold invites for £200 each.
- gfxgirl 6y agoI didn't have that experience with gmail, I had it with oddmail which was 1-2-3 years before gmail? Oddmail reproduced Outlook in a webpage (3 panes, folders, list of items in selected folder, contents of selected email) oddmail was bought by yahoo