20 years ago Gmail revolutionized email. It's time for a new revolution

The 1gb storage space certainly didn’t hurt either, at a time when Hotmail was offering peanuts.

I'm curious what your workflow looks like?

I come from the perspective that email is totally broken; both in my personal spam filled inbox and in my corporate information black hole email. So I'm genuinely curious

It was delightfully sparse coming from heavyweight desktop clients. Though now that I'm at 98% capacity, I need to hook up a heavyweight client to do real cleaning...

Also 1 GB of inbox storage, this was a lot more than others like Yahoo IIRC

> It was just a very good client that worked well but roughly the same as people were already used to.

UI-wise, yes, but GMail was also the first mainstream "AJAX" [1] app. Before it the expectation was that clicking on almost anything on the page would cause a full page refresh. GMail was in part revolutionary because of how snappy it felt for a webmail client.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)

I mean, even as someone who has now removed google from my life as much as possible including no longer relying on gmail.

I disagree, I think gmail was genuinely a step forward. I remember the yahoo of the time just being extremely clunky. A polished fast UI can be considered a revolution in its own right.

Wasn't it also one of the first to do HTML emails or am I mis-remembering?

The email threads were a really nice quality of life feature.

Of course we have the amount of space it gave you and that weird ticking space thing that made everyone's space go up at a consistent pace.

That being said, the way I see it. Email doesn't really need a revolution at this point in time. It does what it needs to do, it does it well (except for spam), and I feel like attempt to move past that (wasn't it google that showed off some sort of interactive emails?) are ultimately a bad thing.

Personally I like that email has stagnated a bit, let it do its job without tacking on feature after feature.

I've been using Gmail since its start and I don't remember it ever having a good client.

> I’ve seen so many of these revolutionary email clients over the years but they all fail.

Even their own _Inbox_ app failed, although mostly because Google _Googled_ it.

> The reason gmail was successful is that it didn’t revolutionize email. It was just a very good client that worked well but roughly the same as people were already used to.

I take it you never had a Hotmail account with 5mb mailbox limit (though by 2005 was a bit larger like maybe 10 or 20mb).

The revolutionary thing about gmail is that it offered 10x-100x more space than its competitors, for free. Everything else about it was whatever.

"It's just too hard to get people to radically change their workflow, and tbh the current one isn't even that bad."

Gmail's update last month mandating use of Javascript radically changed workflow for me. The difference in speed and resource consumption for me against the faster HTML version is significant, not to mention an increasing cluttered interface. Over time, people get used to the slower speed. Very sad. More of our time and resources stolen by a so-called "tech" company. I thought I was free from this nonsense when I quit using Windows decades ago. I was wrong.

Gmail serves Google first and Gmail users second. When it wants to make changes that benefit Google, it can make them, no matter how "radical". Why. Because it's too difficult for Gmail users to find an alternative mail provider.

Fastmail is a paid solution, and you are comparing it to the ad-laden version of gmail. They are absolutely going to be different experiences.

You do in fact appear to be heavily biased based on your previous involvement with google, it shows.

I seem to have an old yahoo email that I had set up 2fa about 8 years ago. Recently it logged me out abruptly and wont let me back in. That number is with someone else and they are fearing otp hijacking and have blocked me.

I have a considerable number of accounts liked to that so I am kinda in the soup. Urrrgh.

Is there no standardized way to solve these problems ?

I can give details about the email, recovery number, aliases, settings, last emails I remember

Has no one faced these problems ?

I'm in the same boat, even though I have the email, password and recovery email; and all the emails from the account forward to me.

If all of us who are locked out of our Google accounts got together and made a HN post, we might be able to get it on the front page, which is the only officially-recognized support channel for Google now.

I was considering switching over to Tuta, but haven't spent the time on it yet. Did you end up moving to another provider or hosting your own?

Google Inbox had some issues but I really miss two things about it: the ability to make certain categories of email be hidden for the rest of the day or week after you reviewed them once, and the ability to add tasks to your inbox, either associated with emails or standalone.

They said they would fold the functionality of inbox into Gmail but they never did for those features.

Inbox was a legitimate improvement on "normal" email, and I still miss it.

Worth remembering that Inbox was created by the Sparrow acquisition. Google hasn't innovated by itself in a long time.

similar to protonmail, european, came out of the post-snowden shift towards e2e services

I like their mission. I used them for a while and the service was great, but I got annoyed at not being able to use any other client than theirs. I wanted to use Thunderbird, but they don't support IMAP for encryption reasons. I switched to Fastmail and it's been nice, I like that they're fixing the shortcomings of email by pushing for new standards like jmap. I'd probably have stuck with Tuta if they had a plan for a new standard that let them be privacy oriented and also let me use Thunderbird.

They aren't bad at all but be warned that you shouldn't use them for throwaway addresses that are lightly used. They will delete your account if there hasn't been activity for 6 months.

Sounds like a lot of time, but surprising how quickly that time runs out.

Something to be aware of up front.

this is in fact annoying with proton cal on a mac. i can only subscribe to it with mac cal (to see alongside my other calendars).

Dall-E crap. If they won't pay an illustrator, I don't really trust their human rights position.

middle english? https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gredy#Middle_English

You do want server-related infrastructure, at least so the clients can find each other.

I think Matrix fits most of what you describe. I'd really like commercial Matrix offerings to become commonplace. I think there could be a market opportunity here, but most businesses would rather lock you into a proprietary service.