20 Years of Gmail | Hacker News Reader

20 Years of Gmail

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47 pointsthm108 comments

As much as I used to love Gmail, the past few years I've been getting increasingly more afraid to be reliant on it. I've seen way too many fuck ups from Google where people randomly got banned because some algorithm decided to, and appealing or getting to a human support is pretty much impossible.

Too true. I dont remember exactly what story it was, but I got my last straw a few years ago and eliminated google from my toolbox.

For email I went with FastMail.

Another happy fastmail user here. If you use a custom domain you also make it easier to switch going forward (though not as true for me because I use an email alias for each account).

The most tedious bit of the switch is updating all accounts, but if you use 1Password at least you have a list of them. Many sites have issues around changing your email and on some it’s even impossible (literally have to create a new account instead)

You can keep your old gmail account around with forwarding on to catch any stragglers.

There are a few companies that continue to email my old one despite me having updated my email (Microsoft/xbox is particularly bad about this), some just send me the privacy policy email each year which I’m guessing is tracked in a separate mailchimp or something that I can’t unsubscribe from.

For some this is even after using CCPA to try to have them delete profile content, probably only 80% of sites are willing or able to comply.

I finally managed about a month ago to switch off of gmail after meaning to for years. I guess I probably had my account for 20 years!

That's my main concern with Gmail and Drive. On the other hand I've yet to see numbers on the probability of losing access to my email on Gmail vs another provider.

> I've yet to see numbers on the probability of losing access to my email on Gmail vs another provider.

This is a great point. People often act as the other providers are 100 percent reliable without any numbers to back it up. Grass is always greener on the other side. To be fair, Google’s customer service is non-existent though.

I wonder how many of the cases that failed to appeal skimped on adding a recovery email or phone number.

Thing is, with other providers, all I'm getting is email. With Google, I'm getting a bunch of services, all interconnected, and any of them could potentially get my entire Google account banned. One of the fuck ups I can recall is a bunch of people getting their Google account banned because they typed in chat of a Youtube livestream and some algorithm falsely picked it up, cutting them off from everything.

Yes, it is a good idea to use multiple Google accounts to separate these concerns. Google explicitly allows this[1].

[1] https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/40695?hl=en#zippy....

that doesn't really solve the issue because Google can close all of the accounts associated with you in one fell swoop.

I own the domain, I control DNS, I pay a provider for email, and my phone and laptop have full downloads via IMAP. The last step aside I don't think that is an uncommon setup. Uptime might be worse, I don't know that there is a real problem there losing access.

I wonder what the actual stats are.

In terms of principles I completely agree. I don’t want to have that sword perpetually dangling above my account. But I suspect we’re practically just worried about being struck by lightning.

For me...

Banning by Google as a single point of failure seems less likely than the single points of failure in ordinary alternatives to Gmail.

For example, I relied on backing up Thunderbird profiles as an email archive for many many years. Based on my years of experience the probability that my old spinning disks in the box in the closet are unreadable is higher than the probability that I will get banned by Google.

Google hardware is more reliable than mine. Google's algorithms are more reliable than me. That's me of course, not you and your mileage can and will vary.

It also probably depends a lot on the footprint you create with your Google account.

If you only use it to receive email, your chances of being banned are probably very low.

If you are an active YouTuber, back up every photo to Google Photos, rely on Google Drive for heavy collaboration, and publish an app, your chances of being banned should be much higher, and increase with each Google service you use.

I agree it depends. Everything is that way.

But statistically ordinary people are not active Youtubers, don’t heavily collaborate through drive, and don’t publish apps.

And statistically, I would expect a vast preponderance of Google bans are justified by the specifics of the “it depends.”

I did not mean the meaningless idea of "everything depends, I guess," but what I wanted to make was an important and profound distinction.

From a risk perspective, it is highly beneficial to limit the use of Google services to the really important things without which life online is very uncomfortable.

That would probably be identity/Gmail, Play Store access, Pay, and maybe Drive.

For almost all other major risk vectors (especially anything where you would publish content), it is just an obvious and dreadful uncertainty with little data to make a proper case. It's just smart to hedge against Googles all-or-nothing-ban attitude by using a multitude of service providers.

My grandfather digitized all of his family photo negatives (thousands), and wanted to upload them to Google Photos, which would have been an awful idea, given the huge differences in tolerance of nudity between Germany in the 50s to 80s and the US today.

I once bought a device through the Google Store, and Google said they'd send me a box to return my old device. For sending back my old device, Google was going to give me some money (as a discount for buying a new device).

The box never arrived and I asked Google Store support about it twice. I didn't dare ask a third time because, after all, it's Google. It's just not worth $140 to look like someone who might be a scammer, and I felt throughout the conversation that the other side seemed to see it that way. I would have insisted on the return box if I had bought it at Saturn or MediaMarkt, because what would they do if they don't like me? Power matters.

anything where you would publish content

Here it depends too.

The devil has been in the details for the vast majority of “google banned me” [1] stories I have read…

When there are details.

The hypothetical case of your grandfather’s photos would be an example of Google acting reasonably, correctly, and in good faith. The devil in the details matters.

[1] or “PayPal froze my funds,” “Amazon kicked me off the platform,” etc.

Did they give you the discount or did you not go through with the purchase? I'd be doubly-wary if they gave me the discount but didn't let me send the phone back. Instant ban if (when) they ever found out.

I'm on the same boat but I can't find an email client that has a web version and a phone version that also doesn't force me to use their email server.

Closest you can get is thunderbird + K9 and it doesn't allow snoozing email on phone, which is a hard requirement for me

At the time when Gmail came out, Hotmail was offering 15MB of storage. Gmail, out the gate offered 1GB. For many, despite the mining, was a godsend to actually getting online and maintaining an inbox that didn't have to be cleaned weekly, if not earlier.

Nah, it was 2MB. ! (Which is what I remember)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19000696

Contemporaneous discussion:

https://techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=19510

Hotmail's free limit might have been even lower, 2MB: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/2004/06/20/h...

The gmail sign up page had a counter that continuously went up showing the number of bytes available for your mailbox.

It was glorious. I remember getting an invite for the beta from a random online forum.

> Hotmail was offering 15MB of storage. Gmail, out the gate offered 1GB.

15 MB made you care what was in your folder. People deleted old messages and attachments. It was a communications tool first, and incidentally a storage service.

I was heading a small data storage company when Google brought out googlemail (later gmail). We lost all our customers almost overnight. You couldn't compete with 1GB of free storage. That's how people used it, almost immediately; want to store some files? Just email them to yourself at googlemail!

> despite the mining

Nobody knew about the mining. People trusted Google. News of the betrayal still hasn't reached some older folks.

Googlemail was a cultural turning point. It's where people stopped caring about their data, where it was, who took responsibility for it, or personally managing it. It may be the true birth of "The Cloud" as "your data on someone elses computer".

>Nobody knew about the mining. People trusted Google.

It was the era of Don't be evil. And people blindly trusted them.

Did Google even know they were going to be an ad company back then?

Internet advertising barely even seemed like a thing back in 2004, and I don't think anybody actually realized just how well you would be able to target advertising by systematizing all the world's information, never mind how much you would be able to charge for it, and how willing people would be to accept it.

This was the era of isolated banner ads that could barely even track clicks. I don't think people were wrong not to see where things were going back then.

>Did Google even know they were going to be an ad company back then?

Yes it was even listed on their IPO prospectus. They knew very early on it will be Ads. The only thing no one knew at the time was how big is the online ads market.

>and I don't think anybody actually realized just how well you would be able to target advertising by systematizing all the world's information

There were plenty ( including myself ). But no one gives a damn about it. Google's privacy issues were later reported in 2006 / 2007, and Steve Jobs went on to put more fuel into it, or I would even argue kick started the whole privacy angle in Silicon Valley.

Google went public in August 2004, so <5 months after Googlemail launched, which is what we're talking about here. And it's hard to criticize regular people for not seeing privacy issues in 2004 that weren't surfaced until 2006/7, especially when the average person barely knew how to use email.

I know 20 years doesn't seem like all that long ago, but no normal person had any expectation that they would be carrying a device in their pockets that reported their every move and conversation to a giant megacorp that sold their attention to the highest bidder. Not back then.

> Gmail, out the gate offered 1GB.

Also was (IIRC) announced / released on April 1, so there was confusion as folks weren't quite sure if this was a real product or not ("1GB? Really?").

This was a pretty big shift. From categorizing and labeling your stuff to the "big pile of junk". Just like how we moved from manually maintained topic based link lists (Yahoo) to generic search.

I remember the front page of the evening standard covering it, and commenting to a colleague how they had fallen for an April Fools. It’s was so ridiculous to have that much storage for free.

Gmail was announced on Apr 1. I vaguely remember people thinking the 1GB was a joke. And it was also advertised as “unlimited” where the space grew with every passing second.

Not only did GMail offer more storage, but its spam filter was light years ahead of all the competition. IIRC, Hotmail used to publicly publish every Hotmail user that signed up, making it a huge spam target. I had to clean out the spam daily or I wouldn't receive any new email. Moving to GMail was a life changing event.

GMail is my last bit of goodwill towards Google even as they shut down other services I used and paid for. When it goes, so will I.

The spam filter is going downhill now too

> despite the mining

PSA they don’t mine paid customers (just like FastMail)

I still wish email could have evolved with Google Wave. Remember that? It was much more like a rich messaging chat app that could also handle emails.

I don't think I'll ever understand why Google thought the invite rollout would work for Wave. It worked for Googlemail because you could use it to interact with people with other email providers. Your experience was just better than theirs. It failed for Wave because Wave was useless if you didn't have any contacts who were on it.

If I'm asked to come up with the dumbest product launch strategy I've ever seen, this will always be hard to beat.

+1 gmail missed a golden opportunity to uplevel from "email" to "communications" and in doing so, avoid the fragmentation of slack/discord/etc.

I remember when Google first offered some form of encryption with Gmail - I think it was as simple as an https connection - and Yahoo refused to do so.

Google seemed like the good guy back then.

Since then things have changed on that front somewhat, and even the UI got to be unusable for basic tasks (I can't find the "next" button on the page of search results).

Yup still have my welcome email from the beta:

"First off, welcome. And thanks for agreeing to help us test Gmail. By now you probably know the key ways in which Gmail differs from traditional webmail services. Searching instead of filing. A free gigabyte of storage. Messages displayed in context as conversations."

I remember the marketing around the gigabyte was that you'd never have to delete another email, and I guess that was true!

I find younger generations fascinated when I explain how Gmail was "invite-only" in its early years. Some of my earliest archived emails are conversations with random forum friends who I provided with one of my six allotted invites.

Yeah my story is that I paid ~$10 for my invite on ebay. Wild.

My brother somehow got a Gmail invite early on and then we ended up with effectively infinite invites by inviting ourselves whenever we needed more of them. They were useful for contests on his small forum because everybody wanted effectively infinite email storage.

I don't even remember most of the usernames anymore but I probably had a dozen or so Gmail accounts back in the 00s.

What amazes me when thinking about Gmail is how today's thunderbird (or evolution or whatever) are still miles away from the ease of use the old GMail UI had.

Local search is as slow and as bad as it was 20 years ago.

I am probably not doing it right though.

Search in Thunderbird is ok, you're doing it wrong.

Indeed, on a fresh installation search works really well.

It's after I add accounts and start downloading emails that it begins to suck.

Indeed, search in thunderbird is ok, but search in gmail is awesome. I started archiving my emails in folders and subfolders again once I stopped using gmail interface.

I've been using thunderbird for years and I still find search to be bad. I've never really made experiments to see why it's bad, but often I type the name of a correspondant to find a particular message, but I don't find it. I guess I am used to the fuzzy search magic that happens in other software.

Ctrl+Shift+F and "search all of the following" with multiple filter lines returns me what I need most of the times. It required switching my workflow though, yeah, the Google's fuzzy email search is really good.

I use TBird. I believe there are two search mechanisms:

1) The "Search Messages" dialog that you get to from the menu Edit/Find/Search Messages... Can you say "slow"? I knew you could! I tried this just now, and it seems to be stuck "building a summary file for" one of my local folders.

2) The "Search" box that appears in the title bar. (What is it with scattering tools all around the outside of an app?) This is fast.

The advantage of (1) is that you can limit its search to particular locations, but you pay for that with sluggishness.

There's also the quick filter as a third method.

Isn't it because Gmail is both client and server, and therefore is not limited to the IMAP protocol ?

Thunderbird has access to all the mail locally in my case. POP3.

But I think this is on point, Google has the infrastructure to index that massive amount of data while my thunderbird still deals with mbox (I think) and can only index when it's running (and god forbids that indexing hogs up my celeron and my 3gb of RAM !).

Peter Norvig at Google gave me an invite a few years before it was released to the public. For over 20 years it has been useful for me and my family, but now I just use that very old email account as a reliable backup email. Off topic, but ProtonMail has I improved so much over the years that it is now my go-to email provider.

I have twice paid for and used Google Workspace for my personal use (I like CloudSearch) but it was a nuisance having all the stuff I buy from Google (books, movies, music+, YouTube with no ads, GCP cloud services) attached to my free Google account vs. heavy heavy use of Google Workspace. It would be great if Google solved that problem.

Proton is great, but WOW did they royally screw up a most recent Android app update. Dark mode now makes text black on dark gray. Biometric locks were turned off without user action. Sent messages and received messages with no font set show up in fixed-width font. Backspacing to the end of one word automatically deletes the space between that word and the word behind it. And if you're the last one to reply in a thread and want to add something, it leaves the "To:" box empty because it can't figure out you don't want to reply to yourself--and doesn't show you any of the addresses for past messages in a way you can copy and paste to fix it. Oh, and they added a THIRD tap to archive an open message, as though two wasn't already too many for the number one thing users want to do once a message is open.

I haven't seen an app update break basic functionality so completely in about a decade. It's atrocious.

We're truly sorry for the inconvenience the recent app update has caused you. Rest assured, our team is aware of the issues you've mentioned and is working hard to address them as quickly as possible. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

When they launched gchat in gmail it took over all chat in my friend groups in high school and college. Then i guess they had to throw it away :(

PSA for anyone else whose Gmail experience has become unusably slow recently:

I was facing 60+ seconds latency to open any email on Chrome through my Macbook. No issues on the Android app. I believe this started at the time Gemini launched. I had Gemini advanced and all its extensions enabled.

I was recently able to fix it by disabling the workspace extension in Gemini and waiting a bit. Enabling it again a few days later didn't reintroduce the perf issue (yet). Not sure if Google fixed a bug internally and my toggling just happened to coincide or what.

Sometimes it's hard for me to imagine how the current teenagers, and people in their 20s apparently, grew up with what I always considered Web 2.0 technology and smart phones — in my mind innovations of my time. They OTOH basically had internet/gps in their hands and pockets since birth. Social media equals internet and smart phones are the only phones they know.

Are they more fuelled to invent the next thing?

Look back and see who invented the previous Next Big Thing(s),that's often a good indicator.

Not sure that's helpful advice... as looking back confirms that previous inventors a) didn't have access to today's tech and b) did use the most modern tech of their era, so that's a point on each side of the argument. What exactly are you suggesting that looking back at will answer this question?

I think every "era" had a new piece of technology which the previous generation wasn't born with but a subset was both young enough to have and old enough to start creating something.

So if now it's ubiquitous computing ans GPS (as the OP mentioned), in the past it could have been having a PC or even a computing machine at all. And next it could be having personalised LLM for every little thing imaginable.

Previous generations what they grew up learning to interact with was also tools of creation. Even computers allowed you to create, so 90s kids grew up learning how to create the next thing. But today? Smartphones doesn't let you create anything except tiktok shorts.

Gmail or not - e-mail will continue to provide the backbone of digital conversation for personal life and business. Because it is not a proprietary protocol but an open standard protocol with free, open-source implementations independent of operating systems and platform companies.

None of your chats will be there in 5 years, but all your emails can be in another 20 years, if you elect not to delete them. The one thing you need to remember is what you want to happen to your emails once you pass away; it will all get lost unless you put your email passport in a sealed envelope somewhere safe (e.g. deposit with your will at a notary public, or in your safe).

I was a GMail user from the only-by-invite stage but some years ago I've ditched it to own my mails. In users terms GMail was probably the first WebUI with a nice and effective search built-in (not crappy limited IMAP search), a decent contact completion and many not-so-integrated services in the same package. However the don't be evil motto's is history now and mails are more and more important in modern life (a bit a time as the society digitalize), good search do exists also with local tools (notmuch, mu to name the best I've found, I use notmuch). Local tools allow a level of integration GMail still can't offer, and much more automation. MailDrop + a simple script automate my bills notes, just reading my mails as a small example.

So well... My compliments for all GMail devs, especially for those who have made it as a side project in their paid free worktime, that pay back Google MUCH, MUCH more than the expense, but today for me GMail and Alphabet services are a no go. I still have a non monitored account used only for Meet, since some ask me to use Meet, but that's is.

A little surprised have not seen any complaints about "the new Gmail". (Perhaps I have missed them.) No more basic HTML version. The "update" gives new meaning to the phrase "phone home". The telemetry and data collection is way more than just knowing which emails the user reads. Just waiting for Google to demand that the user turn on camera and microphone in order to read mail. It's like computer users cannot say "no" anymore and the so-called "tech" companies know it. Anything goes.

I have some workarounds but TBH it seems like using POP3 to download all mail and store it on own media might be best solution.

> Just waiting for Google to demand that the user turn on camera and microphone in order to read mail.

That'll be to better secure your account with your biometrics

I started with an @gmail account, then switched to google for your domain. I've managed to migrate everything off google over the years, partly due to privacy concerns and partly with self hosting, except my google play purchases are still tied to this account. It will be interesting to see where they / I go if they get rid of these legacy accounts without migration or I give up on Android one day.

The first decade was awesome but now we're well after divorce and don't even greet each other on the street. Thanks anyway Gmail.

I remember in beta receiving an invite was like finding Willy Wonka’s golden ticket.

its absolutely crazy how bad some fundamentals are in gmail. its impossible to autocomplete or find recipients. if you try to archive a fresh email while gmail tries to mark it as read, which takes multiple seconds for some reason, the archiving fails. search is unusable and fails to surface even trivial queries. There is no activity trail so its impossible to tell if you accidentally archived or deleted an email eg. because your phone unlocked in your pocket. the list goes on. the only change since the google inbox shutdown i could see was added whitespace in the ui.

I fail to corroborate some of these complaints.

Autocompletion of addresses from address book or previous emails works fine for me. Search is pretty good.

As of an audit log of actions like archving, which other large services offer it? I don't remember e.g. Outlook having it. The log would be pretty large, with rather few users.

GMail did not change materially in last few years, and I'm fine with that; the desktop version is pretty fine. I miss bulk actions in the Android client though.

(I I were to move to another email service, I'd be afraid to lose the system of labels. Both Proton, Fastmail, and Outlook have labels, but I'm not certain that the existing GMail labels would would export to any of these. Self-hosted email does not offer labels easily at all. Local labels are possible with e.g. notmuch, but that won't be shareable between desktop and mobile, for instance.)

Hi! Note that if you import your emails from Gmail into Proton Mail via our Easy Switch, the labels will be imported too: https://proton.me/easyswitch. During the process, you're also given an option to select what you wish to import and what you wish to leave out. If you encounter any issues during the import, please contact us at: https://proton.me/support/contact.

> The service now has an estimated 1.2 billion users — about 1/7 of the global population

Based on how many Gmail addresses I know I have, and how many I’d apparently forgotten about until I got a notice at my recovery address that the account was about to be deleted due to inactivity, I’m going to express a bit of skepticism at this particular statistic.

Yep, I know people who have at least 25 different accounts they use for whatever different purpose. And don't get me started with throwaway addresses just for sending email notifications from a self-hosted server.

And let's not forget all the Gmail accounts linked to Android phones which many do not even know they have.

I want basic HTML mode back. I don't want chat or instant pestering. I don't want autogenerated replies when I am composing. I don't need a Google calendar. Whatever the next "innovative" feature is, I'm probably not interested.

I loved the simplicity of the old HTML view. One page load, one page render. No progress bars or animations, just a webpage that works. Bad network conditions never create unexpected behavior for old style form submissions. If the request fails, I can always press F5 to resubmit.

My system has 64GB of ram. This is more than sufficient for 2024. But why would I waste it on features that annoy or fluff I never use?

Bring back basic HTML.

Still unapologetically using rocketmail address as my burner email.

After gmail, proton, fastmail nothing beats the nostalgia and the let down I felt when yahoo bought and destroyed it.

I traded a poster for the HBO series Carnivale for my invite.

If you're on a Mac, Mimestream is a fantastic native frontend to gmail.

Mimestream looks so incredibly polished. But just like all third party clients that use the Gmail API, it doesn't support muting:

https://portal.productboard.com/mimestream/1-mimestream-road...

Does anyone remember how long ago the API came out? It definitely wasn't at the original product launch, but I imagine it too has a lot of years at this point.

I never used that feature. I'd probably just create a filter that sends the email to trash.

Is it out of beta yet?

I for one, hate being a Gmail customer and still having ads cluttering the account.

This reminds me that my Gmail account is over 19 years old, and I'm still being asked for my birthday to confirm I'm over 18. Could you at least try a bit harder to justify abusing my data, dear Google?

How are they to know you aren't your own grandpa?

How is being their own grandpa makes them younger than 18 if their account is 19 year old ?

Grandpa signs up 19 years ago. Grandson has, at some undetermined point later, gained access to Grandpa's account.

How old is the Grandson?

Let me rephrase that:

How is being their own grandpa makes them younger than 18 if their account is 19 year old ?

15 year old time-traveller creates account in 2003 and bumps uglies with grandma before returning to 2024 or something.

Oh, I thought you were going for an Alabama joke with people marrying their in-laws and becoming their own grandfather, not time travel.

Re-reading that, a 15 yo travel back in time to have sex with his grandmother so she can give birth to a son the will have a son and this son will be old enough in 2024 to travel back in time in 2009 and impregnate his grandmother ? He biologically couldn't originally come from 2024, his father hasn't had time to develop the ability to reproduce.

Or anyone is time travelling and your explanation is basically just magic.

Definitely Alabama vibe though :].

In my story one can assume that "bumping uglies with gamgam" and "registered a gmail account in 2003" occurred on separate time-trips. If we want to make a book out of it we could do the whole "I didn't know she was gamgam!" meets "Wish I was one of the first!" Time travel trope collision.

My agent will call your agent about the movie rights. I think we can safely leave the final twist details to JJ Abrams.

A predestination rewatch has been on my mind for some weeks now, I know how I'll spend the evening :].

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