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And it was productized before then. AOL being a huge one ("You've got mail"), and Hotmail also coming to mind.

And email was around long before AOL or Hotmail.

And nobody used it, relatively speaking vs the extraordinary scale that those email products made possible later.

Hotmail had more users after 18 months than the total history of all email services on earth combined for the first two decades of email. If email was still as annoying to use as it was pre AOL & Hotmail, the general public still wouldn't be using it today.

How many people used any internet technology before there was even in Internet? But some people did use email.

Great point. Webmail is a product that was massively adopted compared to regular clients.

Perhaps, but no particular web implementation of email really stands out. (You might say Gmail, Gmail is really comparatively recent.) So a web interface on email push adoption further.

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