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Comment by jakevoytko | Hacker News Reader

Gmail.

Using web-based email clients was a nightmare before Gmail. They had limited storage space, and the UX was pretty bad, they were hard to search, etc. You spent all your time figuring out what you wanted to delete, or seeing your emails bounce when people had full inboxes. If you didn't log in for a while, your account would disappear.

And then suddenly, you got a GB of storage. For free. No questions asked. And its UI was simple and easy-to-use. And you could search it.

A lot of other products are 10x better in individual areas. For instance, Google Sheets was much more portable/shareable than Excel when it launched. But even today there's no comparison, Excel is superior for actual spreadsheet functionality. But Gmail was better on every axis, even against local clients like Thunderbird and Outlook.

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>And then suddenly, you got a GB of storage. For free. No questions asked. And its UI was simple and easy-to-use. And you could search it.

Also don't forget that Gmail at the time had the most intelligent spam blocking algorithm compared to AOL/Yahoo/Hotmail/etc.

It was a big enough deal that some observers that switched to Gmail considered the email spam problem as "solved" because Gmail seemed so good at it. (On the other hand, many independent people trying to run their own SMTP servers think that Gmail is too aggressive with spam filtering because it also blocks many legitimate senders with low/unknown reputation.)

Is there a better spam filter today?

Define better. Gmail does a pretty good job for most use cases but it's all about compromises. One person's spam is another's ham; so you will unavoidably end up with false positives and/or false negatives. For some organisations you might want a system that you can fine tune those.

Funnily enough, Gmail can be on the receiving end sometimes too, e.g. being blocked in SORBS.

The response was:

  451 Currently Sending Spam See:
  http://www.sorbs.net/lookup.shtml?209.85.215.41

Although some may argue that SORBS is a bad system, anyway.

I studied Google's file system. What Google figured out is that, with the rise of very fast networking such as 10 Gig Ethernet and faster, the network is much faster than local disk. Files were spread across multiple servers so they could all stream different parts of the file off their local disks simultaneously to the client computer faster than the local disk on any one computer could run. Thus, you could have systems like Gmail that could run much faster than even local disk based email clients, even with thousands of users.

Other providers were probably using expensive NASs with huge profit margins built in. Google was using thousands of the cheapest crappiest commodity parts because it was all triple redundant... and it worked faster because the network was really fast and multiple computers could stream different parts of the same file to clients.

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

Very, very influential reading back in the day, and still interesting.

It also came out at an interesting time, because everyone was trying to push data-to-redundancy ratios to their limits. Since storage was so expensive back then, storing multiple copies of data made little sense when looking at it from a data storage view, even if the speeds were much better

Then Google dropped their MapReduce paper: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

Which quite literally paved the way for modern data processing, and works extremely well with the Google Filesystem architecture

Yeah, and then everyone took hadoop and threw it on a NAS or they provision it in the cloud and...throw it on a NAS. Always scratched my head on that one.

Gmail also automatically saved drafts. I can't tell you how many long emails I wrote and lost before hitting the send button with other web email UIs.

Gmail was not just 10x. I think it redefined what a good web based email experience could be. I think it completely changed what people realized and expected the web browser could be from an interactivity standpoint.

And conversation view. Hiding the quoted email being responded to.

Email before always looked like how Twitter threads do today.

Not just a GB. It was also constantly increasing in size, with a live counter to show how much storage you had available. Super gimmicky, but fun.

I guess there are probably a lot of people here who are too young to have ever used those early versions. You also had to scrounge forums for an invite code.

I made my account(s) off invite codes and have "just my last name" at gmail dot com as an address... it's one of my most prized possessions, to this day!

I managed to snag my (very common) italian last name. I get a flood of messages every day. I both love and hate my account.

I don't even speak italian!

do you receive any interesting emails?

I get the same thing. My last name isn't that common though so I've messaged the culprits specifically (especially if they use their phone number when signing up for whatever it is) to ask them to please stop using it.

Someone will have the idea and sign up for 5-6 things all in one burst, which usually inspires my outreach.

Hanging out in IRC channels in early 2000s was how I wasted my teenage years. But I did get a gmail invite out of it leading to my primary email address to this day: arithmetic@gmail.com

Thats awesome man.

I also have <last name>@gmail.com. It’s not a super common last name, but common enough that I get emails almost daily from people accidentally omitting a first initial.

I convinced my mom to buy me a beta invite for $5 on ebay and then spread my invites out to my family and friends.

Gmail was amazing when it launched...I was so excited to get an invite from a friend during the beta period. It made the crappy POP sync for my ISP email account look like a joke. Funny thing is–closing in on 20 years later–I dislike the latest generation of Gmail's web interface so much that I'm back to using a desktop email client.

I dislike it so much out of the box, or with a new account. When I help older people they look at Google like it is in hieroglyphics that they can’t understand because everything is an icon instead of a word. Then there’s the by default sorting your mail box for you and also having threaded emails. Features that have good intentions but just make it impossible to find the emails you are searching for.

> or seeing your emails bounce when people had full inboxes.

For those who don't remember: That was around the time when Yahoo offered 6MB, some others only 2MB.

Found this CNET article: https://www.cnet.com/news/google-to-offer-gigabyte-of-free-e...

They say 2 MB Hotmail, 4 MB Yahoo. Gmail went straight to a gigabyte.

It was so crazy people wrote code to use gmail as a network drive.

Ah, those were the days... ;)

http://web.archive.org/web/20070708004553/http://richard.jon...

http://libgmail.sourceforge.net

https://pramode.net/articles/lfy/fuse/pramode.html/

Today a single email without attachments can get close to those numbers!

How many emails was that back then?

The Gmail web interface also (re)invented AJAX. The number of web applications that used XMLHttpRequest increased exponentially after the success of Gmail.

it was also written in Java which then compiled into client side javascript(!)

Not the original version. The current version is a hybrid of code compiled from Java (J2CL, previously GWT) mostly business logic shared with Android, iOS, and the server backends, and a UI that is built with Closure Library. It's monolithically compiled and globally optimized via Closure Compiler.

They announced it on April Fools. And it seemed like a joke - 1GB for email? Yeah. Right. Hotmail had, what, 10MB? 15?

Best April Fools joke ever.

pretty sure Yahoo was 5MB and Hotmail 2MB when gmail came out.

Seems ancient at this point, but a total game changer at the time. I can actually recall getting my invite in 2006.

I bought invites on eBay for myself and a few family members. Maybe $5 each. Although I thought it was closer to 2004.

> If you didn't log in for a while, your account would disappear

That's still true for gmail, but the time is more reasonable at two years.

Agreed. Too bad it seems that email's best days are over now, as email nowadays is mostly for notifications.

>Too bad it seems that email's best days are over now, as email nowadays is mostly for notifications.

Email is still heavily used for business-to-business communication between humans. Talking about business matters is still more natural via email until the participants know each other well enough to switch to texting.

But yes, for personal communication, friends & family have shifted from email to phone texts. E.g. my friend who graduated from college in 1990s used to communicate with his parents with 100% email but now it's 100% text messaging. Email is too much friction for personal comms.

"Notifications" is being generous here. The average user's email inbox is 90% marketing spam.

Any sources on that? I’m guessing the 90% is hyperbole, but I still wonder how much spam the average user actually gets. (For me, close to absolute zero)

Pretty much every company/service out there opts you into spam unless you proactively opt-out of it (which takes effort and knowledge to work around the dark patterns).

Looking at my password manager I've got ~260 logins right now and keep in mind that I don't do social media and try to avoid creating accounts as much as possible (and delete the ones I don't use for a long time), so the average user is likely to have a lot more accounts.

Even if each one of these companies only spammed once a week (most will do more frequently if you let them), that'll already significantly outnumber the amount of legitimate e-mail I receive.

It has taken me over a year to wrangle my inbox into shape (unsubscribing from all marketing email that isn't spam/gets through google's spam filter) and I would say anecdotally that my incoming email has decreased by at least 90%. I go multiple days without receiving emails now.

Was Gmail really 10x better than Hotmail?

Gmail was 100x Hotmail, if not even more than that. I think anybody who was on Yahoo Mail/Hotmail (or even something like Roundcube) who switched to Gmail probably realized how much these other companies had been holding stuff back.

I've never cared for invite only stuff, but Gmail really was a total revolution when it came out.

I thought the “invite only” approach was clever. It throttled growth so they could maintain a good user experience and limited automated use by spammers.

In terms of mailbox space, it was 500x Hotmail. Before Gmail you had to delete your old emails because if your mailbox was full it would stop receiving. The whole approach of "archive" and being able to search your entire email history from any computer in a webmail interface came from Google.

There was POP3 before this of course, to keep all your mail locally and empty out the server box. But that only works if you have a single computer that you check mail from. Even back in 2004 when Gmail launched that was a non-starter for me, I had email at home and at school.

Long story short, yes.

Hotmail was 10x worse than all alternatives. It was an ugly web page, not an app.

Gmail took XMLHttpRequest and its ActiveX fallback (we used to call this “comet”) and proved the world that we can ship a robust app inside a web browser.

It was well designed, had no ugly banners like Hotmail did, it was really fast, simple and working like a desktop app.

For historical context: XMLHttpRequest was invented for outlook web access, so the idea and usecase preceded gmail.

The first time I saw it was in Google's Orkut, their first failed social network. But it did have cool AJAX.

> Was Gmail really 10x better than Hotmail?

No.

Gmail did not suck badly enough to be merely 10× better than Hotmail.

Gmail was lightyears beyond other early free webmail services.

Sadly, this isn’t even snark.

Hotmail had a 2MB e-mail limit. Gmail came with 2GB.

I don't use either but the hotmail/live/outlook system is a disaster.

I think people who have addresses there must just use them as throwaways as they don't seem to have much utility. You can be a small email sender with everything right, clean IP, on no block lists, SPF, DKIM, mta-sts. You can have no problems with any other major email provider. You can be signed up to SNDS. And they will just routinely block your IP for no reason and it will not even show up in SNDS and you can't resolve it through the tools they provide to mail senders on SNDS. So you have to go through this stupid process of filling in a support form which gives an automatic reply saying there is nothing to fix and you can't reply. But you do reply and then they fix it until next time.

There is no innovation there. I guess some accountant has determined that paying sweat shop labour to untick an IP every time their brain dead system blocks the same sender with no spam history is cheaper than actually fixing their systems. This is a flashback to 1990s Microsoft where their software was buggy as hell and your support options were power cycling or reinstalling.

They not only put their company name on this mess but offer it on outlook.com which creates an association with the pro email solutions they sell to a massive enterprise market. They should be embarrassed.

What gets me is they don't honour whitelisting email addresses when their reasons for blocking can be really spurious.

Hotmail offered 2Mb space and Yahoo proudly claimed "twice the space of other providers" with their 4Mb offer. I had a GMX.de account that was providing 25 Mb and felt like a king. Then April 1, 2004 came and nothing was the same anymore.

I didn't have that experience with gmail, I had it with oddmail which was 1-2-3 years before gmail? Oddmail reproduced Outlook in a webpage (3 panes, folders, list of items in selected folder, contents of selected email)

oddmail was bought by yahoo

Gmail was so good that when it was in beta i sold invites for £200 each.

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