12 ms·

20 Years of Gmail

47 points by thm 3y ago

malablaster 3y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
zoky 3y ago
> The service now has an estimated 1.2 billion users — about 1/7 of the global population Based on how many Gmail addresses I know I have, and how many I’d apparently forgotten about until I got a notice at my recovery address that the account was about to be deleted due to inactivity, I’m going to express a bit of skepticism at this particular statistic.
- xandrius 3y ago
  Yep, I know people who have at least 25 different accounts they use for whatever different purpose. And don't get me started with throwaway addresses just for sending email notifications from a self-hosted server. And let's not forget all the Gmail accounts linked to Android phones which many do not even know they have.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
qprofyeh 3y ago
Sometimes it's hard for me to imagine how the current teenagers, and people in their 20s apparently, grew up with what I always considered Web 2.0 technology and smart phones — in my mind innovations of my time. They OTOH basically had internet/gps in their hands and pockets since birth. Social media equals internet and smart phones are the only phones they know. Are they more fuelled to invent the next thing?
- xandrius 3y ago
  Look back and see who invented the previous Next Big Thing(s),that's often a good indicator.
  - swores 3y ago
    Not sure that's helpful advice... as looking back confirms that previous inventors a) didn't have access to today's tech and b) did use the most modern tech of their era, so that's a point on each side of the argument. What exactly are you suggesting that looking back at will answer this question?
    - xandrius 3y ago
      I think every "era" had a new piece of technology which the previous generation wasn't born with but a subset was both young enough to have and old enough to start creating something. So if now it's ubiquitous computing ans GPS (as the OP mentioned), in the past it could have been having a PC or even a computing machine at all. And next it could be having personalised LLM for every little thing imaginable.
      - Jensson 3y ago
        Previous generations what they grew up learning to interact with was also tools of creation. Even computers allowed you to create, so 90s kids grew up learning how to create the next thing. But today? Smartphones doesn't let you create anything except tiktok shorts.
KyleSanderson 3y ago
At the time when Gmail came out, Hotmail was offering 15MB of storage. Gmail, out the gate offered 1GB. For many, despite the mining, was a godsend to actually getting online and maintaining an inbox that didn't have to be cleaned weekly, if not earlier.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- interestica 3y ago
  Nah, it was 2MB. ! (Which is what I remember) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19000696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19000696 Contemporaneous discussion: https://techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=19510 https://techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=19510
- xnx 3y ago
  Hotmail's free limit might have been even lower, 2MB: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/2004/06/20/hotmail-yahoo-step-up-the-mailbox-rivalry/61eaea4f-21d2-4ea9-8f15-5312e11952e4/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/2004/06/20/h...
- akdev1l 3y ago
  The gmail sign up page had a counter that continuously went up showing the number of bytes available for your mailbox. It was glorious. I remember getting an invite for the beta from a random online forum.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  > Hotmail was offering 15MB of storage. Gmail, out the gate offered 1GB. 15 MB made you care what was in your folder. People deleted old messages and attachments. It was a communications tool first, and incidentally a storage service. I was heading a small data storage company when Google brought out googlemail (later gmail). We lost all our customers almost overnight. You couldn't compete with 1GB of free storage. That's how people used it, almost immediately; want to store some files? Just email them to yourself at googlemail! > despite the mining Nobody knew about the mining. People trusted Google. News of the betrayal still hasn't reached some older folks. Googlemail was a cultural turning point. It's where people stopped caring about their data, where it was, who took responsibility for it, or personally managing it. It may be the true birth of "The Cloud" as "your data on someone elses computer".
ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
[flagged]
- century19 3y ago
  You don’t consider Maps a Google product? I guess there was some tech acquisition part there.
  - ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
    Everything else were acquisitions and all the self made products were a failure.
    - dartos 3y ago
      What about g suite? Google drive, docs, sheets, photo, the biz facing tools. Those are all successful.
      - arjunaanand 3y ago
        Acquisitions
        asah 3y ago
        The acquisitions were kiddie toys compared with what gsuite is today. Ditto for YouTube. my source: I was there and I'm friends with 100s of the people involved, and saw firsthand how hard everyone worked.
- skeeterbug 3y ago
  Maps, Chrome, Golang, Android, Photos
  - nolist_policy 3y ago
    Chromebooks
mihaic 3y ago
This reminds me that my Gmail account is over 19 years old, and I'm still being asked for my birthday to confirm I'm over 18. Could you at least try a bit harder to justify abusing my data, dear Google?
- verticalscaler 3y ago
  How are they to know you aren't your own grandpa?
  - johnchristopher 3y ago
    How is being their own grandpa makes them younger than 18 if their account is 19 year old ?
    - Jenk 3y ago
      Grandpa signs up 19 years ago. Grandson has, at some undetermined point later, gained access to Grandpa's account. How old is the Grandson?
      - johnchristopher 3y ago
        Let me rephrase that: How is being their own grandpa makes them younger than 18 if their account is 19 year old ?
        Jenk 3y ago
        15 year old time-traveller creates account in 2003 and bumps uglies with grandma before returning to 2024 or something.
        johnchristopher 3y ago
        Oh, I thought you were going for an Alabama joke with people marrying their in-laws and becoming their own grandfather, not time travel.
FredPret 3y ago
I remember when Google first offered some form of encryption with Gmail - I think it was as simple as an https connection - and Yahoo refused to do so. Google seemed like the good guy back then. Since then things have changed on that front somewhat, and even the UI got to be unusable for basic tasks (I can't find the "next" button on the page of search results).
vwcx 3y ago
I find younger generations fascinated when I explain how Gmail was "invite-only" in its early years. Some of my earliest archived emails are conversations with random forum friends who I provided with one of my six allotted invites.
- burntsushi 3y ago
  Yeah my story is that I paid ~$10 for my invite on ebay. Wild.
- bdw5204 3y ago
  My brother somehow got a Gmail invite early on and then we ended up with effectively infinite invites by inviting ourselves whenever we needed more of them. They were useful for contests on his small forum because everybody wanted effectively infinite email storage. I don't even remember most of the usernames anymore but I probably had a dozen or so Gmail accounts back in the 00s.
pram 3y ago
Yup still have my welcome email from the beta: "First off, welcome. And thanks for agreeing to help us test Gmail. By now you probably know the key ways in which Gmail differs from traditional webmail services. Searching instead of filing. A free gigabyte of storage. Messages displayed in context as conversations." I remember the marketing around the gigabyte was that you'd never have to delete another email, and I guess that was true!
ilayn 3y ago
Still unapologetically using rocketmail address as my burner email. After gmail, proton, fastmail nothing beats the nostalgia and the let down I felt when yahoo bought and destroyed it.
johnchristopher 3y ago
What amazes me when thinking about Gmail is how today's thunderbird (or evolution or whatever) are still miles away from the ease of use the old GMail UI had. Local search is as slow and as bad as it was 20 years ago. I am probably not doing it right though.
- lifestyleguru 3y ago
  Search in Thunderbird is ok, you're doing it wrong.
  - johnchristopher 3y ago
    Indeed, on a fresh installation search works really well. It's after I add accounts and start downloading emails that it begins to suck.
  - 10729287 3y ago
    Indeed, search in thunderbird is ok, but search in gmail is awesome. I started archiving my emails in folders and subfolders again once I stopped using gmail interface.
  - 2pie 3y ago
    I've been using thunderbird for years and I still find search to be bad. I've never really made experiments to see why it's bad, but often I type the name of a correspondant to find a particular message, but I don't find it. I guess I am used to the fuzzy search magic that happens in other software.
    - lifestyleguru 3y ago
      Ctrl+Shift+F and "search all of the following" with multiple filter lines returns me what I need most of the times. It required switching my workflow though, yeah, the Google's fuzzy email search is really good.
- mcswell 3y ago
  I use TBird. I believe there are two search mechanisms: 1) The "Search Messages" dialog that you get to from the menu Edit/Find/Search Messages... Can you say "slow"? I knew you could! I tried this just now, and it seems to be stuck "building a summary file for" one of my local folders. 2) The "Search" box that appears in the title bar. (What is it with scattering tools all around the outside of an app?) This is fast. The advantage of (1) is that you can limit its search to particular locations, but you pay for that with sluggishness.
lifestyleguru 3y ago
The first decade was awesome but now we're well after divorce and don't even greet each other on the street. Thanks anyway Gmail.
clircle 3y ago
When they launched gchat in gmail it took over all chat in my friend groups in high school and college. Then i guess they had to throw it away :(
nonamenoslogan 3y ago
I traded a poster for the HBO series Carnivale for my invite.
izoow 3y ago
As much as I used to love Gmail, the past few years I've been getting increasingly more afraid to be reliant on it. I've seen way too many fuck ups from Google where people randomly got banned because some algorithm decided to, and appealing or getting to a human support is pretty much impossible.
- dudul 3y ago
  Too true. I dont remember exactly what story it was, but I got my last straw a few years ago and eliminated google from my toolbox. For email I went with FastMail.
  - homefree 3y ago
    Another happy fastmail user here. If you use a custom domain you also make it easier to switch going forward (though not as true for me because I use an email alias for each account). The most tedious bit of the switch is updating all accounts, but if you use 1Password at least you have a list of them. Many sites have issues around changing your email and on some it’s even impossible (literally have to create a new account instead) You can keep your old gmail account around with forwarding on to catch any stragglers. There are a few companies that continue to email my old one despite me having updated my email (Microsoft/xbox is particularly bad about this), some just send me the privacy policy email each year which I’m guessing is tracked in a separate mailchimp or something that I can’t unsubscribe from. For some this is even after using CCPA to try to have them delete profile content, probably only 80% of sites are willing or able to comply.
- jtbayly 3y ago
  I finally managed about a month ago to switch off of gmail after meaning to for years. I guess I probably had my account for 20 years!
- cbolton 3y ago
  That's my main concern with Gmail and Drive. On the other hand I've yet to see numbers on the probability of losing access to my email on Gmail vs another provider.
smeej 3y ago
I still wish email could have evolved with Google Wave. Remember that? It was much more like a rich messaging chat app that could also handle emails. I don't think I'll ever understand why Google thought the invite rollout would work for Wave. It worked for Googlemail because you could use it to interact with people with other email providers. Your experience was just better than theirs. It failed for Wave because Wave was useless if you didn't have any contacts who were on it. If I'm asked to come up with the dumbest product launch strategy I've ever seen, this will always be hard to beat.
- asah 3y ago
  +1 gmail missed a golden opportunity to uplevel from "email" to "communications" and in doing so, avoid the fragmentation of slack/discord/etc.
bilalq 3y ago
PSA for anyone else whose Gmail experience has become unusably slow recently: I was facing 60+ seconds latency to open any email on Chrome through my Macbook. No issues on the Android app. I believe this started at the time Gemini launched. I had Gemini advanced and all its extensions enabled. I was recently able to fix it by disabling the workspace extension in Gemini and waiting a bit. Enabling it again a few days later didn't reintroduce the perf issue (yet). Not sure if Google fixed a bug internally and my toggling just happened to coincide or what.
jll29 3y ago
Gmail or not - e-mail will continue to provide the backbone of digital conversation for personal life and business. Because it is not a proprietary protocol but an open standard protocol with free, open-source implementations independent of operating systems and platform companies. None of your chats will be there in 5 years, but all your emails can be in another 20 years, if you elect not to delete them. The one thing you need to remember is what you want to happen to your emails once you pass away; it will all get lost unless you put your email passport in a sealed envelope somewhere safe (e.g. deposit with your will at a notary public, or in your safe).
palmfacehn 3y ago
I want basic HTML mode back. I don't want chat or instant pestering. I don't want autogenerated replies when I am composing. I don't need a Google calendar. Whatever the next "innovative" feature is, I'm probably not interested. I loved the simplicity of the old HTML view. One page load, one page render. No progress bars or animations, just a webpage that works. Bad network conditions never create unexpected behavior for old style form submissions. If the request fails, I can always press F5 to resubmit. My system has 64GB of ram. This is more than sufficient for 2024. But why would I waste it on features that annoy or fluff I never use? Bring back basic HTML.
jFriedensreich 3y ago
its absolutely crazy how bad some fundamentals are in gmail. its impossible to autocomplete or find recipients. if you try to archive a fresh email while gmail tries to mark it as read, which takes multiple seconds for some reason, the archiving fails. search is unusable and fails to surface even trivial queries. There is no activity trail so its impossible to tell if you accidentally archived or deleted an email eg. because your phone unlocked in your pocket. the list goes on. the only change since the google inbox shutdown i could see was added whitespace in the ui.
- nine_k 3y ago
  I fail to corroborate some of these complaints. Autocompletion of addresses from address book or previous emails works fine for me. Search is pretty good. As of an audit log of actions like archving, which other large services offer it? I don't remember e.g. Outlook having it. The log would be pretty large, with rather few users. GMail did not change materially in last few years, and I'm fine with that; the desktop version is pretty fine. I miss bulk actions in the Android client though. (I I were to move to another email service, I'd be afraid to lose the system of labels. Both Proton, Fastmail, and Outlook have labels, but I'm not certain that the existing GMail labels would would export to any of these. Self-hosted email does not offer labels easily at all. Local labels are possible with e.g. notmuch, but that won't be shareable between desktop and mobile, for instance.)
  - protonmail 3y ago
    Hi! Note that if you import your emails from Gmail into Proton Mail via our Easy Switch, the labels will be imported too: https://proton.me/easyswitch https://proton.me/easyswitch. During the process, you're also given an option to select what you wish to import and what you wish to leave out. If you encounter any issues during the import, please contact us at: https://proton.me/support/contact https://proton.me/support/contact.
RattlesnakeJake 3y ago
Is it out of beta yet?
mark_l_watson 3y ago
Peter Norvig at Google gave me an invite a few years before it was released to the public. For over 20 years it has been useful for me and my family, but now I just use that very old email account as a reliable backup email. Off topic, but ProtonMail has I improved so much over the years that it is now my go-to email provider. I have twice paid for and used Google Workspace for my personal use (I like CloudSearch) but it was a nuisance having all the stuff I buy from Google (books, movies, music+, YouTube with no ads, GCP cloud services) attached to my free Google account vs. heavy heavy use of Google Workspace. It would be great if Google solved that problem.
- smeej 3y ago
  Proton is great, but WOW did they royally screw up a most recent Android app update. Dark mode now makes text black on dark gray. Biometric locks were turned off without user action. Sent messages and received messages with no font set show up in fixed-width font. Backspacing to the end of one word automatically deletes the space between that word and the word behind it. And if you're the last one to reply in a thread and want to add something, it leaves the "To:" box empty because it can't figure out you don't want to reply to yourself--and doesn't show you any of the addresses for past messages in a way you can copy and paste to fix it. Oh, and they added a THIRD tap to archive an open message, as though two wasn't already too many for the number one thing users want to do once a message is open. I haven't seen an app update break basic functionality so completely in about a decade. It's atrocious.
  - protonmail 3y ago
    We're truly sorry for the inconvenience the recent app update has caused you. Rest assured, our team is aware of the issues you've mentioned and is working hard to address them as quickly as possible. Thank you for your patience and understanding.
pupppet 3y ago
I remember in beta receiving an invite was like finding Willy Wonka’s golden ticket.
zeagle 3y ago
I started with an @gmail account, then switched to google for your domain. I've managed to migrate everything off google over the years, partly due to privacy concerns and partly with self hosting, except my google play purchases are still tied to this account. It will be interesting to see where they / I go if they get rid of these legacy accounts without migration or I give up on Android one day.
smitty1e 3y ago
I for one, hate being a Gmail customer and still having ads cluttering the account.
kkfx 3y ago
I was a GMail user from the only-by-invite stage but some years ago I've ditched it to own my mails. In users terms GMail was probably the first WebUI with a nice and effective search built-in (not crappy limited IMAP search), a decent contact completion and many not-so-integrated services in the same package. However the don't be evil motto's is history now and mails are more and more important in modern life (a bit a time as the society digitalize), good search do exists also with local tools (notmuch, mu to name the best I've found, I use notmuch). Local tools allow a level of integration GMail still can't offer, and much more automation. MailDrop + a simple script automate my bills notes, just reading my mails as a small example. So well... My compliments for all GMail devs, especially for those who have made it as a side project in their paid free worktime, that pay back Google MUCH, MUCH more than the expense, but today for me GMail and Alphabet services are a no go. I still have a non monitored account used only for Meet, since some ask me to use Meet, but that's is.
latchkey 3y ago
If you're on a Mac, Mimestream is a fantastic native frontend to gmail.
- jpeeler 3y ago
  Mimestream looks so incredibly polished. But just like all third party clients that use the Gmail API, it doesn't support muting: https://portal.productboard.com/mimestream/1-mimestream-roadmap/c/161-mute-conversations https://portal.productboard.com/mimestream/1-mimestream-road... Does anyone remember how long ago the API came out? It definitely wasn't at the original product launch, but I imagine it too has a lot of years at this point.
  - latchkey 3y ago
    I never used that feature. I'd probably just create a filter that sends the email to trash.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
A little surprised have not seen any complaints about "the new Gmail". (Perhaps I have missed them.) No more basic HTML version. The "update" gives new meaning to the phrase "phone home". The telemetry and data collection is way more than just knowing which emails the user reads. Just waiting for Google to demand that the user turn on camera and microphone in order to read mail. It's like computer users cannot say "no" anymore and the so-called "tech" companies know it. Anything goes. I have some workarounds but TBH it seems like using POP3 to download all mail and store it on own media might be best solution.
- htrp 3y ago
  > Just waiting for Google to demand that the user turn on camera and microphone in order to read mail. That'll be to better secure your account with your biometrics

20 Years of Gmail

47 points by thm 3y ago

malablaster 3y ago

[flagged]

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

zoky 3y ago

> The service now has an estimated 1.2 billion users — about 1/7 of the global population Based on how many Gmail addresses I know I have, and how many I’d apparently forgotten about until I got a notice at my recovery address that the account was about to be deleted due to inactivity, I’m going to express a bit of skepticism at this particular statistic.

xandrius 3y ago
Yep, I know people who have at least 25 different accounts they use for whatever different purpose. And don't get me started with throwaway addresses just for sending email notifications from a self-hosted server. And let's not forget all the Gmail accounts linked to Android phones which many do not even know they have.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

qprofyeh 3y ago

Sometimes it's hard for me to imagine how the current teenagers, and people in their 20s apparently, grew up with what I always considered Web 2.0 technology and smart phones — in my mind innovations of my time. They OTOH basically had internet/gps in their hands and pockets since birth. Social media equals internet and smart phones are the only phones they know. Are they more fuelled to invent the next thing?

xandrius 3y ago
Look back and see who invented the previous Next Big Thing(s),that's often a good indicator.
- swores 3y ago
  Not sure that's helpful advice... as looking back confirms that previous inventors a) didn't have access to today's tech and b) did use the most modern tech of their era, so that's a point on each side of the argument. What exactly are you suggesting that looking back at will answer this question?
  - xandrius 3y ago
    I think every "era" had a new piece of technology which the previous generation wasn't born with but a subset was both young enough to have and old enough to start creating something. So if now it's ubiquitous computing ans GPS (as the OP mentioned), in the past it could have been having a PC or even a computing machine at all. And next it could be having personalised LLM for every little thing imaginable.
    - Jensson 3y ago
      Previous generations what they grew up learning to interact with was also tools of creation. Even computers allowed you to create, so 90s kids grew up learning how to create the next thing. But today? Smartphones doesn't let you create anything except tiktok shorts.

KyleSanderson 3y ago

At the time when Gmail came out, Hotmail was offering 15MB of storage. Gmail, out the gate offered 1GB. For many, despite the mining, was a godsend to actually getting online and maintaining an inbox that didn't have to be cleaned weekly, if not earlier.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
interestica 3y ago
Nah, it was 2MB. ! (Which is what I remember) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19000696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19000696 Contemporaneous discussion: https://techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=19510 https://techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=19510
xnx 3y ago
Hotmail's free limit might have been even lower, 2MB: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/2004/06/20/hotmail-yahoo-step-up-the-mailbox-rivalry/61eaea4f-21d2-4ea9-8f15-5312e11952e4/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/2004/06/20/h...
akdev1l 3y ago
The gmail sign up page had a counter that continuously went up showing the number of bytes available for your mailbox. It was glorious. I remember getting an invite for the beta from a random online forum.
nonrandomstring 3y ago
> Hotmail was offering 15MB of storage. Gmail, out the gate offered 1GB. 15 MB made you care what was in your folder. People deleted old messages and attachments. It was a communications tool first, and incidentally a storage service. I was heading a small data storage company when Google brought out googlemail (later gmail). We lost all our customers almost overnight. You couldn't compete with 1GB of free storage. That's how people used it, almost immediately; want to store some files? Just email them to yourself at googlemail! > despite the mining Nobody knew about the mining. People trusted Google. News of the betrayal still hasn't reached some older folks. Googlemail was a cultural turning point. It's where people stopped caring about their data, where it was, who took responsibility for it, or personally managing it. It may be the true birth of "The Cloud" as "your data on someone elses computer".

ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago

[flagged]

century19 3y ago
You don’t consider Maps a Google product? I guess there was some tech acquisition part there.
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
  Everything else were acquisitions and all the self made products were a failure.
  - dartos 3y ago
    What about g suite? Google drive, docs, sheets, photo, the biz facing tools. Those are all successful.
    - arjunaanand 3y ago
      Acquisitions
      - asah 3y ago
        The acquisitions were kiddie toys compared with what gsuite is today. Ditto for YouTube. my source: I was there and I'm friends with 100s of the people involved, and saw firsthand how hard everyone worked.
skeeterbug 3y ago
Maps, Chrome, Golang, Android, Photos
- nolist_policy 3y ago
  Chromebooks

mihaic 3y ago

This reminds me that my Gmail account is over 19 years old, and I'm still being asked for my birthday to confirm I'm over 18. Could you at least try a bit harder to justify abusing my data, dear Google?

verticalscaler 3y ago
How are they to know you aren't your own grandpa?
- johnchristopher 3y ago
  How is being their own grandpa makes them younger than 18 if their account is 19 year old ?
  - Jenk 3y ago
    Grandpa signs up 19 years ago. Grandson has, at some undetermined point later, gained access to Grandpa's account. How old is the Grandson?
    - johnchristopher 3y ago
      Let me rephrase that: How is being their own grandpa makes them younger than 18 if their account is 19 year old ?
      - Jenk 3y ago
        15 year old time-traveller creates account in 2003 and bumps uglies with grandma before returning to 2024 or something.
        johnchristopher 3y ago
        Oh, I thought you were going for an Alabama joke with people marrying their in-laws and becoming their own grandfather, not time travel.

FredPret 3y ago

I remember when Google first offered some form of encryption with Gmail - I think it was as simple as an https connection - and Yahoo refused to do so. Google seemed like the good guy back then. Since then things have changed on that front somewhat, and even the UI got to be unusable for basic tasks (I can't find the "next" button on the page of search results).

vwcx 3y ago

I find younger generations fascinated when I explain how Gmail was "invite-only" in its early years. Some of my earliest archived emails are conversations with random forum friends who I provided with one of my six allotted invites.

burntsushi 3y ago
Yeah my story is that I paid ~$10 for my invite on ebay. Wild.
bdw5204 3y ago
My brother somehow got a Gmail invite early on and then we ended up with effectively infinite invites by inviting ourselves whenever we needed more of them. They were useful for contests on his small forum because everybody wanted effectively infinite email storage. I don't even remember most of the usernames anymore but I probably had a dozen or so Gmail accounts back in the 00s.

pram 3y ago

Yup still have my welcome email from the beta: "First off, welcome. And thanks for agreeing to help us test Gmail. By now you probably know the key ways in which Gmail differs from traditional webmail services. Searching instead of filing. A free gigabyte of storage. Messages displayed in context as conversations." I remember the marketing around the gigabyte was that you'd never have to delete another email, and I guess that was true!

ilayn 3y ago

Still unapologetically using rocketmail address as my burner email. After gmail, proton, fastmail nothing beats the nostalgia and the let down I felt when yahoo bought and destroyed it.

johnchristopher 3y ago

What amazes me when thinking about Gmail is how today's thunderbird (or evolution or whatever) are still miles away from the ease of use the old GMail UI had. Local search is as slow and as bad as it was 20 years ago. I am probably not doing it right though.

lifestyleguru 3y ago
Search in Thunderbird is ok, you're doing it wrong.
- johnchristopher 3y ago
  Indeed, on a fresh installation search works really well. It's after I add accounts and start downloading emails that it begins to suck.
- 10729287 3y ago
  Indeed, search in thunderbird is ok, but search in gmail is awesome. I started archiving my emails in folders and subfolders again once I stopped using gmail interface.
- 2pie 3y ago
  I've been using thunderbird for years and I still find search to be bad. I've never really made experiments to see why it's bad, but often I type the name of a correspondant to find a particular message, but I don't find it. I guess I am used to the fuzzy search magic that happens in other software.
  - lifestyleguru 3y ago
    Ctrl+Shift+F and "search all of the following" with multiple filter lines returns me what I need most of the times. It required switching my workflow though, yeah, the Google's fuzzy email search is really good.
mcswell 3y ago
I use TBird. I believe there are two search mechanisms: 1) The "Search Messages" dialog that you get to from the menu Edit/Find/Search Messages... Can you say "slow"? I knew you could! I tried this just now, and it seems to be stuck "building a summary file for" one of my local folders. 2) The "Search" box that appears in the title bar. (What is it with scattering tools all around the outside of an app?) This is fast. The advantage of (1) is that you can limit its search to particular locations, but you pay for that with sluggishness.

lifestyleguru 3y ago

The first decade was awesome but now we're well after divorce and don't even greet each other on the street. Thanks anyway Gmail.

clircle 3y ago

When they launched gchat in gmail it took over all chat in my friend groups in high school and college. Then i guess they had to throw it away :(

nonamenoslogan 3y ago

I traded a poster for the HBO series Carnivale for my invite.

izoow 3y ago

As much as I used to love Gmail, the past few years I've been getting increasingly more afraid to be reliant on it. I've seen way too many fuck ups from Google where people randomly got banned because some algorithm decided to, and appealing or getting to a human support is pretty much impossible.

dudul 3y ago
Too true. I dont remember exactly what story it was, but I got my last straw a few years ago and eliminated google from my toolbox. For email I went with FastMail.
- homefree 3y ago
  Another happy fastmail user here. If you use a custom domain you also make it easier to switch going forward (though not as true for me because I use an email alias for each account). The most tedious bit of the switch is updating all accounts, but if you use 1Password at least you have a list of them. Many sites have issues around changing your email and on some it’s even impossible (literally have to create a new account instead) You can keep your old gmail account around with forwarding on to catch any stragglers. There are a few companies that continue to email my old one despite me having updated my email (Microsoft/xbox is particularly bad about this), some just send me the privacy policy email each year which I’m guessing is tracked in a separate mailchimp or something that I can’t unsubscribe from. For some this is even after using CCPA to try to have them delete profile content, probably only 80% of sites are willing or able to comply.
jtbayly 3y ago
I finally managed about a month ago to switch off of gmail after meaning to for years. I guess I probably had my account for 20 years!
cbolton 3y ago
That's my main concern with Gmail and Drive. On the other hand I've yet to see numbers on the probability of losing access to my email on Gmail vs another provider.

smeej 3y ago

I still wish email could have evolved with Google Wave. Remember that? It was much more like a rich messaging chat app that could also handle emails. I don't think I'll ever understand why Google thought the invite rollout would work for Wave. It worked for Googlemail because you could use it to interact with people with other email providers. Your experience was just better than theirs. It failed for Wave because Wave was useless if you didn't have any contacts who were on it. If I'm asked to come up with the dumbest product launch strategy I've ever seen, this will always be hard to beat.

asah 3y ago
+1 gmail missed a golden opportunity to uplevel from "email" to "communications" and in doing so, avoid the fragmentation of slack/discord/etc.

bilalq 3y ago

PSA for anyone else whose Gmail experience has become unusably slow recently: I was facing 60+ seconds latency to open any email on Chrome through my Macbook. No issues on the Android app. I believe this started at the time Gemini launched. I had Gemini advanced and all its extensions enabled. I was recently able to fix it by disabling the workspace extension in Gemini and waiting a bit. Enabling it again a few days later didn't reintroduce the perf issue (yet). Not sure if Google fixed a bug internally and my toggling just happened to coincide or what.

jll29 3y ago

Gmail or not - e-mail will continue to provide the backbone of digital conversation for personal life and business. Because it is not a proprietary protocol but an open standard protocol with free, open-source implementations independent of operating systems and platform companies. None of your chats will be there in 5 years, but all your emails can be in another 20 years, if you elect not to delete them. The one thing you need to remember is what you want to happen to your emails once you pass away; it will all get lost unless you put your email passport in a sealed envelope somewhere safe (e.g. deposit with your will at a notary public, or in your safe).

palmfacehn 3y ago

I want basic HTML mode back. I don't want chat or instant pestering. I don't want autogenerated replies when I am composing. I don't need a Google calendar. Whatever the next "innovative" feature is, I'm probably not interested. I loved the simplicity of the old HTML view. One page load, one page render. No progress bars or animations, just a webpage that works. Bad network conditions never create unexpected behavior for old style form submissions. If the request fails, I can always press F5 to resubmit. My system has 64GB of ram. This is more than sufficient for 2024. But why would I waste it on features that annoy or fluff I never use? Bring back basic HTML.

jFriedensreich 3y ago

its absolutely crazy how bad some fundamentals are in gmail. its impossible to autocomplete or find recipients. if you try to archive a fresh email while gmail tries to mark it as read, which takes multiple seconds for some reason, the archiving fails. search is unusable and fails to surface even trivial queries. There is no activity trail so its impossible to tell if you accidentally archived or deleted an email eg. because your phone unlocked in your pocket. the list goes on. the only change since the google inbox shutdown i could see was added whitespace in the ui.

nine_k 3y ago
I fail to corroborate some of these complaints. Autocompletion of addresses from address book or previous emails works fine for me. Search is pretty good. As of an audit log of actions like archving, which other large services offer it? I don't remember e.g. Outlook having it. The log would be pretty large, with rather few users. GMail did not change materially in last few years, and I'm fine with that; the desktop version is pretty fine. I miss bulk actions in the Android client though. (I I were to move to another email service, I'd be afraid to lose the system of labels. Both Proton, Fastmail, and Outlook have labels, but I'm not certain that the existing GMail labels would would export to any of these. Self-hosted email does not offer labels easily at all. Local labels are possible with e.g. notmuch, but that won't be shareable between desktop and mobile, for instance.)
- protonmail 3y ago
  Hi! Note that if you import your emails from Gmail into Proton Mail via our Easy Switch, the labels will be imported too: https://proton.me/easyswitch https://proton.me/easyswitch. During the process, you're also given an option to select what you wish to import and what you wish to leave out. If you encounter any issues during the import, please contact us at: https://proton.me/support/contact https://proton.me/support/contact.

RattlesnakeJake 3y ago

Is it out of beta yet?

mark_l_watson 3y ago

Peter Norvig at Google gave me an invite a few years before it was released to the public. For over 20 years it has been useful for me and my family, but now I just use that very old email account as a reliable backup email. Off topic, but ProtonMail has I improved so much over the years that it is now my go-to email provider. I have twice paid for and used Google Workspace for my personal use (I like CloudSearch) but it was a nuisance having all the stuff I buy from Google (books, movies, music+, YouTube with no ads, GCP cloud services) attached to my free Google account vs. heavy heavy use of Google Workspace. It would be great if Google solved that problem.

smeej 3y ago
Proton is great, but WOW did they royally screw up a most recent Android app update. Dark mode now makes text black on dark gray. Biometric locks were turned off without user action. Sent messages and received messages with no font set show up in fixed-width font. Backspacing to the end of one word automatically deletes the space between that word and the word behind it. And if you're the last one to reply in a thread and want to add something, it leaves the "To:" box empty because it can't figure out you don't want to reply to yourself--and doesn't show you any of the addresses for past messages in a way you can copy and paste to fix it. Oh, and they added a THIRD tap to archive an open message, as though two wasn't already too many for the number one thing users want to do once a message is open. I haven't seen an app update break basic functionality so completely in about a decade. It's atrocious.
- protonmail 3y ago
  We're truly sorry for the inconvenience the recent app update has caused you. Rest assured, our team is aware of the issues you've mentioned and is working hard to address them as quickly as possible. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

pupppet 3y ago

I remember in beta receiving an invite was like finding Willy Wonka’s golden ticket.

zeagle 3y ago

I started with an @gmail account, then switched to google for your domain. I've managed to migrate everything off google over the years, partly due to privacy concerns and partly with self hosting, except my google play purchases are still tied to this account. It will be interesting to see where they / I go if they get rid of these legacy accounts without migration or I give up on Android one day.

smitty1e 3y ago

I for one, hate being a Gmail customer and still having ads cluttering the account.

kkfx 3y ago

I was a GMail user from the only-by-invite stage but some years ago I've ditched it to own my mails. In users terms GMail was probably the first WebUI with a nice and effective search built-in (not crappy limited IMAP search), a decent contact completion and many not-so-integrated services in the same package. However the don't be evil motto's is history now and mails are more and more important in modern life (a bit a time as the society digitalize), good search do exists also with local tools (notmuch, mu to name the best I've found, I use notmuch). Local tools allow a level of integration GMail still can't offer, and much more automation. MailDrop + a simple script automate my bills notes, just reading my mails as a small example. So well... My compliments for all GMail devs, especially for those who have made it as a side project in their paid free worktime, that pay back Google MUCH, MUCH more than the expense, but today for me GMail and Alphabet services are a no go. I still have a non monitored account used only for Meet, since some ask me to use Meet, but that's is.

latchkey 3y ago

If you're on a Mac, Mimestream is a fantastic native frontend to gmail.

jpeeler 3y ago
Mimestream looks so incredibly polished. But just like all third party clients that use the Gmail API, it doesn't support muting: https://portal.productboard.com/mimestream/1-mimestream-roadmap/c/161-mute-conversations https://portal.productboard.com/mimestream/1-mimestream-road... Does anyone remember how long ago the API came out? It definitely wasn't at the original product launch, but I imagine it too has a lot of years at this point.
- latchkey 3y ago
  I never used that feature. I'd probably just create a filter that sends the email to trash.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

A little surprised have not seen any complaints about "the new Gmail". (Perhaps I have missed them.) No more basic HTML version. The "update" gives new meaning to the phrase "phone home". The telemetry and data collection is way more than just knowing which emails the user reads. Just waiting for Google to demand that the user turn on camera and microphone in order to read mail. It's like computer users cannot say "no" anymore and the so-called "tech" companies know it. Anything goes. I have some workarounds but TBH it seems like using POP3 to download all mail and store it on own media might be best solution.

htrp 3y ago
> Just waiting for Google to demand that the user turn on camera and microphone in order to read mail. That'll be to better secure your account with your biometrics