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Comment by wai1234 | Hacker News Reader

You write about Gmail as if no one had email before that. GMail doesn't have a single meaningful feature that other clients didn't have before. And those clients didn't completely redo the UI every 3 months whether you want it or not.

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> GMail doesn't have a single meaningful feature that other clients didn't have before

That's an objectively incorrect statement. It had:

1. 1GB storage when every other email provider offered like 50 MB at best

2. Superior search

3. Conversational/threaded view for emails

4. Better spam filtering

5. One of the first "dynamic" web applications to use that newfangled "AJAX" stuff to be more responsive and seem faster

Every other email provider was forced to start offering these features and now they seem commonplace. Reminds me of that old joke where someone goes to see a Shakespeare play and complains it was just one cliche after another.

In the beginning, when Gmail was only accessible by invitation, the killer feature was the relatively huge amount of free storage it offered. 1 gigabyte vs 20 or 100 megabytes at other providers.

When it first came out, gmail was significantly better than the competition, for the following reasons:

1. _much_ better spam filtering

2. _much_ better searching

3. a _lot_ of storage (no need to delete old emails)

When Gmail came out it was also a gigantic money incinerator into which Google shoveled search ads revenue. It is easy to show that Google used one product line to break into another line of business. It would be harder to convince me that this harmed consumers.

Anti-monopoly law is not meant to prevent companies from investing in different product lines. Monopoly law is meant to prevent companies from using one product to force customers to buy into another product.

But dumping is also against (American) antitrust laws.

The storage limits gmail offered for free was unprecedented, and in my experience they were suddenly far more reliable than their competition. I find it's ability to pick events out of natural language emails and add them to your calendar, remind you if you forgot to attach something but it sounds like you meant to, etc. very useful, and I never saw those before despite continuing to be a regular user of Yahoo and Hotmail.

> GMail doesn't have a single meaningful feature that other clients didn't have before.

I'd say that its search-first paradigm to mail handling (and related to that, labels) was rather unusual at the time, and for the most part it still is.

Disclosure: I work at Google and get my regular exposure to GMail from there. I run and use my own mail server for everything that is not work.

Yet Gmail gained momentum really fast. I wonder why that was, the 'others' complete failure to filter spam perhaps?

I think it was the extremely high storage quotas (for the time) and the fact that the UI was ajax’y and didn’t reload the whole page/frame when you clicked.

Spam filtering on gmail has always been OK, but it was fine (for me) on other products for many years before gmail came out. I doubt it was much of a differentiator, but who knows? Maybe the #1 provider before gmail really sucked at it or something.

They were Yahoo and HotMail, and they both had significantly worse spam filtering than gmail. They also had relatively poor security, reflected in bugs that made it common for even relatively careful users to have their accounts hijacked (at least, that’s what I heard from users at the time; I didn’t really use either one much myself.)

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