
How Gmail happened: The inside story on its launch, ten years later - technologizer
http://time.com/43263/gmail-10th-anniversary/
======
tseabrooks
This doesn't show a full appreciation for gmail's timing.

Prior to gmail I had 4 (5?) different email addresses I moved through with
different services. For lots of folks my age (~30) these email addresses we
had predating gmail didn't _mean_ anything. They weren't important, they were
disposable. Gmail's release coincided with the time for many of us when email
addresses starting becoming a thing that mattered. The release lined up with a
general shift towards email as a first class communication mechanism.

Thanks to all of the things not covered in the email spec --- we are suffering
from a bit of email lock in. We figured with phone numbers we needed to be
able to take our phone numbers with us. They're a number people will use to
communicate with us for the rest of our lives.

Email is similar, only it's not really practical to update everyone on your
email address when you switch email providers. Some folks will argue that you
can forward email from one address to another and reply from your new address
- this isn't a real solution. You're still dependent on the intermediary
solution. Not to mention that most people start typing in your name and just
select the first auto complete address that shows up, so you'll have to always
use the old service in case someone emails that address.

We really need innovation in email around some kind of portability. I have no
idea how to design such a setup --- but right now it definitely feels like I
can't leave gmail even if I want to. I have hundreds of people that know my
email address as the only way to get in touch with me. I've signed up with my
email address as my username at hundreds of sites at this point. Hell, half of
those sites don't even let you change the email address of your account.

We're totally locked in.

-edit-

I see comments about using your own domain. While this is obviously a choice
(and you can even use google apps for domains to interact with the address if
you want) it's not a great solution for the masses.

~~~
josteink
_Email is similar, only it 's not really practical to update everyone on your
email address when you switch email providers._

Actually that's dead easy as long as you have ownership of the email-
_address_ used.

If you have an email-address ending in a domain you don't own, yes you are
indeed fucked, because you were naive enough to associate your digital
identity with an object you have no ownership rights to.

If you however use a email-provider to provide email for your own domain, you
own the _address_ and are free to move between providers at no cost what so
ever. Like I did, when I got fed up with Google.

You're not locked in. You can have full freedom with a simple $10 domain. What
are you waiting for?

~~~
tseabrooks
I agree, but that's the very definition of non practical. It doesn't work for
90% of the population. I feel like we should be searching, driving, for
solutions that solve everyone's issue not use _our_ issue. We are, for lack of
a better word, the "digital 1%". Solutions for us don't necessarily work for
everyone.

~~~
danieldk
Somebody has to own and manage the 'namespace'. If it's not you, it is always
going to be someone else.

I think this was one of the motivations for pobox.com. By being primarily a
mail forwarding service, you can switch e-mail provider by simply forwarding
to another address. The same is true for domains, since most registrars have
pretty simple interfaces to set up e-mail forwarding.

The hard parts are dealing with SPF/DKIM (since they don't work well with
forwarding) and e-mail migration.

------
hsuresh
I am glad that we still have email, and i don't wish any other way. Predicting
the death of emails is a trend these days, but unfortunately, none of the
replacements are based on standards. Think of all the services that want email
to be dead - FB, Twitter, WhatsApp, Asana - none of them are based on open
standards.

GMail is a great example, especially when it launched, that you can still
innovate within the boundaries of standards. Twitter is a great example of
what a great protocol/standard it could have been.

~~~
easytiger
I tried to explain how disgusting I find the popularization of closed
communication networks which are cancerous erosion into the free & reliable &
disaster tolerant manner in which we communicate.

~~~
packetslave
not sure if April Fool's joke...

~~~
easytiger
not

------
schuke
When Gmail was launched, I was accessing it with my 1M broadband from China.
But boy was it fast. Not just fast, it was clean, simple, pure. Hotmail, in
contrast, was clumsy and cluttered and Microsoft was stuffing everything MSN
related into it, MSN Space etc.

Ten years later I'm accessing Gmail, still from China, but with my 20M fiber-
optic connection and yet it _just won 't open_. (Certainly this has much to do
with the government as well) But When I do get to open it, I see a cluttered
interface with so much stuff I never use, Hangout, Google Plus, and so on.

Now who's the go-to simple and pure email service? Outlook.

Gmail these days is the mark of Google being an establishment.

~~~
Andrex
Really? Gmail is more pure than it's ever been IMO. Here's a screenshot I took
today: [http://i.imgur.com/iVZ306S.png](http://i.imgur.com/iVZ306S.png) (I've
been using this account for 6-7 years.)

Chat has been apart of Gmail for a long time, and it's always been easy to
turn it off. I barely even notice the Google+ integration, usually it's just
pulling in profile stuff for the right sidebar.

Now, Gmail not opening quickly has been a common complaint for many years, and
seems to usually (but not always) correspond to the account having a lot of
mail (usually in archives.) But that's more of a complaint of using Gmail for
years and years. Certainly, they should upgrade their architecture so it isn't
as much of a problem.

~~~
philtar
Pure is pure, not stuff is hidden. Click on that 3x3 box of squares on the top
right corner and take another screenshot.

Or click on the cog. What's the difference between settings and configure
inbox?

Here's my screenshot. The red boxes are things in gmail by default that are
NOT opt-in and are not in your screenshot:
[http://i.imgur.com/UGZbSky.png](http://i.imgur.com/UGZbSky.png)

------
Niten
I'm surprised this article doesn't place more emphasis on the surprising
quality of GMail's spam filter. Especially in the early days it was a major
differentiator from Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, maybe even more significant than
the difference in storage capacity.

------
carrotleads
I still don't understand why the delayed email feature is not default.

I compose mail at midnight but want it to be sent only during the day. There
is the Boomerang plugin but surely this should be default funtionality.

~~~
untog
I don't think >90% of Gmail users would use that feature.

~~~
thesteamboat
Sorry I had trouble parsing that. Do you mean that you think 90% would not use
the feature, or do you think that the feature would be used by less than 90%
(and is thus not worth being part of the default).

~~~
untog
I think that over 90% would not use that feature.

------
shurcooL
Look at that, it had threaded email conversations back then. Apple still can't
get that on to work consistently (show both messages sent to you and your own
replies in one thread) across OS X/iOS Mail and icloud.com. It only works in
OS X Mail (after you change settings), but not the other two.

~~~
songgao
Threading not working properly is a result of some email clients not
implementing the standard properly.

RFC 2822 [0] has clear definition on threading using In-Reply-To and
References fields. Its precedent RFC 822 [1] had definition on In-Reply-To
field.

However, not all email client implement this feature properly. As a result,
there a lot of "conversational" messages flying around without proper In-
Reply-To field.

To solve this, Gmail builds threading trees not only based on In-Reply-To and
References fields, but also heuristically based on the subject line of emails.
Outlook, on the other hand, ignores In-Reply-To and References fields and
groups messages into threads solely based on subject lines (according to last
time I checked).

And then, allowing (or requiring) emails to have similar subject lines to be
properly threaded implicitly means it's OK for those client that don't produce
proper In-Reply-To/References fields to continue doing so. Therefore, for any
email client to properly thread all types of messages, it has to implement
subject line based threading too.

Things would be much easier if everybody had faithfully implemented the
standard.

[0] [http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2822.txt](http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2822.txt)
[1] [http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc822.txt](http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc822.txt)

EDIT: added RFC links

~~~
atmosx
Yes, I still remember discussions about email clients with this FreeBSD core
developer trying to convince us at the time that Mutt is better than any
graphical client, especially because of the way it handles threads.

To me at the time were _empty words_ , why on earth I would wanna use a
terminal-client in an HTML5 world?

Well now that Mail.app started giving me the creeps after the volume of email
increased, I'm slowly reconsidering... And although will be a steep learning
curve, I'm seriously thinking of switching to mutt...

~~~
songgao
I did this about a month ago and am still using it. mutt is the only thing
that 1) I feel comfortable with; and 2) works with GPGTools.

Airmail would make a good alternative if it supported GPGTools :-(

~~~
atmosx
I'm waiting for Mailpile[1] too.

[1] [https://www.mailpile.is/](https://www.mailpile.is/)

------
dilap
As much as the capacity or the search, I feel the UI of the original gmail was
extremely well done and innovative -- I remember immediately preferring it to
the dominant desktop clients of the time, Outlook and Thunderbird.

But sadly, over the years the design has been tweaked and evolved in ways that
have lessened the originals snappiness and focus (a problem that appears to
endemic to all of Google right now).

So now I'm back to mucking about with native clients, which, happily, do seem
to be gaining momentum recently (and Gmail works fine as an IMAP backend,
which is very kind of Google). (Though to add insult to injury, Google
purchased and then abandoned one of most-promising native email client,
Sparrow, which was not very kind!)

~~~
kfury
Thanks!

------
lifeisstillgood
>> All along, though, Gmail’s creators were building something to please
themselves, figuring that their email problems would eventually be everybody’s
problems. “Larry [Page] said normal users would look more like us in 10 years’
time,”

This reflects a common meme around here - pg has mentioned it in essays for
example, but I am getting old now, and I am no longer sure if geek culture is
still scouting several years ahead of the mainstream, or if it is and I am
just no longer keeping up.

Who is living tomorrow's world and what does it look like?

I will throw in

\- remote working \- video conferencing and mobile phones \- scheduling a
meeting with someone's web site not their email.

~~~
rubyrescue
group chat in place of email

------
exodust
While I appreciate some aspects such as reliability, I have felt let down by
other issues as the product has evolved. The big one being they suddenly tied
gmail login to youtube, google search and other things. Activities I consider
fundamentally separate activities from "emailing on the web".

Unwanted sign-in across services I consider unrelated, from a user point of
view. Yep, cool technology and social media strategy and all, now how do I
switch that feature off?

What we need is a checkbox: []'Gmail only sign-in', in settings, so when you
open youtube in a new tab, you're not signed in automatically unless you
choose to be.

And why is choice so unpopular in human user interface design these days? Why
is 'opt-in' considered a barrier to business?

Ok ok, so 2004... I remember sending feedback into Google back then "we need a
delete button". Google had been advertising as a feature that you "don't need
to delete email ever", and you actually couldn't because there wasn't a delete
button. They added one later, and you could even re-label it "bin" if you
wanted. :-)

~~~
acheron
IIRC you could always delete, but for a long time it was only available from a
pull-down menu that was not especially obvious. Finally they gave in and moved
it to its own button.

~~~
exodust
I've dug a little more, and while it was possible to delete emails, you
couldn't delete a whole folder at once. Looking back at comment threads from
2004, I can see a lot of people asking for a delete button and the option to
delete everything in a label at once.

Also, my mistake.. the "trash" folder is renamed "bin" according to your
English language setting (British vs US).

------
mathattack
_With Gmail–which was originally code-named Caribou, borrowing the name of a
mysterious corporate project occasionally alluded to in Dilbert_

Life imitates art!

I think Gmail was one of the first that put general acceptance of keeping
things on the cloud. It was the first mail server that I didn't keep
downloading to a local mail package.

~~~
scholia
Hotmail and Yahoo Mail did that many years earlier....

~~~
mathattack
They did it, but my perception is people were still downloading to local
clients. (At least I was, until gmail)

------
pan69
I remember when Gmail was fist launched. It was the future. We'd recovered
from the dot com burst and I suddenly could see how this was going to work
again. To use Gmail then you had to get an invite which was a bit of a
problem. I asked around for days, if not weeks (can't remember) and when I
finally signed up, I also had invites to give away. I think there where 10.
Later this was set to 100 and eventually I was removed all together.

Today Gmail is a bit of a shadow of it former glory, after the Google UX nazis
got their hands on it I guess...

------
fsckin
For context, I was working at a minimum wage job when Gmail launched. I won an
eBay auction for an invite a few weeks after launch for a whopping $36 --
something I thought there would be a good chance of eventually regretting.

Soon after I signed up, I received 5 or 10 invites, and flipped those on eBay
the next day.

Other than the NSA funny business, I haven't regretted it one bit.

------
ern
_There’s a 24 /7 culture, where people expect a response. It doesn’t matter
that it’s Saturday at 2 a.m.–people think you’re responding to e-mail. People
are no longer going on vacation. People have become slaves to email._

 _It’s not a technical problem. It can’t be solved with a computer algorithm.
It’s more of a social problem._

Wouldn't a "do not disturb" feature that queues email in a hidden label until
an appointed time work here?

Also don't most people who want instant responses use IM nowadays?

~~~
PakG1
You never had someone email you and then phone you right away to confirm that
you received the email? I myself was guilty of doing that before when I had a
really urgent situation. Didn't realize what I was doing until I got called on
it. But I see it happen unfortunately.

------
Hawkee
I wonder if Google has considered supporting Markdown in Gmail yet.

------
arunc
I switched to the basic Gmail just to look at how the good old Gmail felt
like.

~~~
trentmb
GMail was awesome, but it got worse as time went on. I now just use IMAP so I
don't have to inconvenience myself with the web interface anymore.

~~~
noel82
But you still use it. I remember the struggle for catching invites and then
the magic happened. Never used any other account from that.

~~~
i386
Remember how we used Outlook before GMail because it was the only kid on the
block? That's where we are at with GMail. The new mail experience hasn't been
built yet.

~~~
josteink
Fastmail isn't free, but it has everything which made Gmail good in the first
place. And since you're paying, you know _email_ is the product and that you
won't become collateral in a user-hostile Google+ like strategy.

For those interested in checking it out, feel free to use to use the following
referral link while doing so.

[http://www.fastmail.fm/?STKI=11413330](http://www.fastmail.fm/?STKI=11413330)

Obvious disclaimer: The link above is a referral link. I will benefit if you
use it.

~~~
danieldk
At the very least Fastmail is terribly fast :), which you immediately see when
you're using their web interface. They keep hot and recent data on SSDs.

Also, since they actually implement IMAP correctly (they are one of the major
contributors of the open source Cyrus IMAP server), things like MailTags
work[1], whereas they don't on Google Mail.

The only thing that is missing are push notifications (e.g. via ActiveSync),
but they are working on an app. In the meanwhile, using pushover is also an
option.

They actually have a two month trial, so they're definitely worth trying out.

[1] [http://www.indev.ca/MailTags.html](http://www.indev.ca/MailTags.html)

------
wehadfun
I did not find gmail to be that revolutionary. Yahoo mail, hotmail for email
purposes were fine. The one thing Gmail did revolutionize was the amount of
span and email chains you had to delete. Google Maps was revolutionary

