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I'm old enough to remember that gmail was largely the creation of one person; a person who was neither a programming god nor business guru. It's tempting to thi

I'm old enough to remember that gmail was largely the creation of one person; a person who was neither a programming god nor business guru. It's tempting to think that we could sit down and make an open source gmail clone.

maxerickson 13y ago
The reasonably slick web interface is the boring part of the service.
SilasX 13y ago
Who?
- sheetjs 13y ago
  Wikipedia credits Paul Buchheit: > The idea for Gmail was pitched by Rajen Sheth during an interview with Google,[55] and went on to be developed by Paul Buchheit several years before it was announced to the public. Initially the email client was available for use only by Google employees internally. Google announced Gmail to the public on April 1, 2004.
gus_massa 13y ago
If you don’t have Paul Buchheit in your list of programming gods, your list must be very short. Anyway, probably the fist version sucked and he used a lot of internal libraries.
aryastark 13y ago
My brain hurts from contemplating what you wrote. The point of gmail is that they take the configuration and headache of maintaining a mail server away from you. If you're okay with running your own qmail/sendmail, then there are vastly better open source UI options than gmail. Google didn't invent email. They just run some of the world's largest mail servers as a (mostly) free service.
- hueving 13y ago
  >there are vastly better open source UI options than gmail. Really? Because I haven't found a web front-end as good. Otherwise I am happy running my own mail server.
  - aryastark 13y ago
    I don't consider a web UI as anything more than a temporary workaround for when I don't have a native mail client around. They all tend to suck. Even gmail's. Try roundcube if you must.
JohnBooty 13y ago
Mentioning the original Gmail seems a bit of a red herring. Surely the community would expect something closer to 2014's Gmail (which is the product of tens of millions of dollars of engineer-hours, even if you skip all of the advertising-enabling gunk that an open-source clone would surely skip) before a theoretical Gmail clone got any kind of traction. A clone that approaches "modern" Gmail is absolutely possible, of course. My original "Are you serious?" was just a bit of incredulity aimed at the person who asked "Hey, why isn't anybody on this yet? Is it hard?" Possible? Yes. Hard? Yes.

maxerickson 13y ago

The reasonably slick web interface is the boring part of the service.

SilasX 13y ago

Who?

sheetjs 13y ago
Wikipedia credits Paul Buchheit: > The idea for Gmail was pitched by Rajen Sheth during an interview with Google,[55] and went on to be developed by Paul Buchheit several years before it was announced to the public. Initially the email client was available for use only by Google employees internally. Google announced Gmail to the public on April 1, 2004.

gus_massa 13y ago

If you don’t have Paul Buchheit in your list of programming gods, your list must be very short. Anyway, probably the fist version sucked and he used a lot of internal libraries.

aryastark 13y ago

My brain hurts from contemplating what you wrote. The point of gmail is that they take the configuration and headache of maintaining a mail server away from you. If you're okay with running your own qmail/sendmail, then there are vastly better open source UI options than gmail. Google didn't invent email. They just run some of the world's largest mail servers as a (mostly) free service.

hueving 13y ago
>there are vastly better open source UI options than gmail. Really? Because I haven't found a web front-end as good. Otherwise I am happy running my own mail server.
- aryastark 13y ago
  I don't consider a web UI as anything more than a temporary workaround for when I don't have a native mail client around. They all tend to suck. Even gmail's. Try roundcube if you must.

JohnBooty 13y ago

Mentioning the original Gmail seems a bit of a red herring. Surely the community would expect something closer to 2014's Gmail (which is the product of tens of millions of dollars of engineer-hours, even if you skip all of the advertising-enabling gunk that an open-source clone would surely skip) before a theoretical Gmail clone got any kind of traction. A clone that approaches "modern" Gmail is absolutely possible, of course. My original "Are you serious?" was just a bit of incredulity aimed at the person who asked "Hey, why isn't anybody on this yet? Is it hard?" Possible? Yes. Hard? Yes.