I’ve seen so many of these revolutionary email clients over the years but they all fail. It’s just too hard to get people to radically change their workflow, and tbh the current one isn’t even that bad.
(0): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GMail_Drive
Edit to Add: Apparently the storage wasn't unlimited? At least from a cursory look at Wikipedia. Huh. Memory is a funny thing.
The main reason for success was that Google was still generally seen as a not evil company, while other mail providers were garbage/evil.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/gmail-accoun...
Google later changed it to “unlimited” which increased daily by an MB or so. At some point settled at 15 GB.
https://gmail.googleblog.com/2013/05/bringing-it-all-togethe...
Not sure if it was unlimited actually before this point.
At least give us 30GB free, 15GB is just obnoxiously low for how much value G data mines from inboxes.
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.
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.
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
Also, if you filter for the word "unsubscribe," you can cut through a good chunk of low-priority automatic messages.
Even their own _Inbox_ app failed, although mostly because Google _Googled_ it.
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’m not sure about revolution, but e-mail can certainly be evolved.
20 years ago, not as many emails were sent, especially transactional emails. User behavior has evolved since then.
For example, storing email receipt of a random Amazon order from 2 years ago doesn’t make much sense these days.
Hey has addressed some of these changes, but there is a lot of room for improvement.
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.