To some Gmail may not been very different from Hotmail or Yahoo Mail, and email predates those products as well. All three were invented with hopes of attractin

To some Gmail may not been very different from Hotmail or Yahoo Mail, and email predates those products as well. All three were invented with hopes of attracting users by brining a better experience to email. That was precisely the point of my comment—that there have been a large number of products that have been introduced to enhance email. A few of these products have been very widely adopted. Some others have been adopted but to a lesser degrees. Some (e.g. spam filtering, which used to be completely independent of mail clients/services) have become so universal that they are now shipped as features of the clients themselves. Sometimes products are so successful that it's hard to remember what it was like before they came out. While every person has preferences for this or that service, there is a reason why so many people now use gmail instead of what they used previously, which was often their ISP provided address and a desktop client. Good clients are just one such example.