Don't forget the other advantage of Gmail over other webmail hosts back then: the amount of free disk space they gave to every account was HUGE. And if you want

Don't forget the other advantage of Gmail over other webmail hosts back then: the amount of free disk space they gave to every account was HUGE. And if you wanted regular mail clients, IIRC Gmail always allowed you to use a traditional mail client, both over IMAP and over POP3.