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Comment by jonathanstrange | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity, would you explain what you mean by that? Google was founded in 1998 and writing a mail client isn't terribly complicated. Did they buy some code for Gmail from an older company? Is Gmail older than Google?

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A full featured mailed client is insanely complicated. If you think mail client is just smtp, you probably think word is just text with some styling and excel is just some cells and functions.

I’m sure, buried somewhere deep in Google systems, are vestiges of mail server code originally written in the 80s. But when people use the name Gmail, they are generally referring to the client facing web app, which does not have any such code.

If it exists, it's probably not at all related to Gmail or only used for testing. I don't think Google reuses a lot of third party code in its first party server software.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/18-956_d18f.pdf

I mean it has happened in other Google products...

Even "just smtp" isn't trivial.

It is, or was at least. At the age of 13, I've created one for Windows. It was relatively widely used at the time.

it is not. gmail is 100% from paul bucheit.

He wasn't sitting there writing binary code and implementing all 7 layers of the OSI stack by hand, he was was gluing together pre-existing components. And the pre-existing components he had access to include two major email startups acquired by Google in 2001 and 2003, which were founded in 1995 and 1997 respectively. (Although he does have at least two patents for features and algorithms he co-invented while making Gmail.)

If I invite you to a barbeque and tell you I made lunch, will you tell me off because I didn't raise and butcher the cow?

This is more like using a sauce that someone else made.

> Did they buy some code for Gmail from an older company?

They bought both Deja and Neotonic.

Gmail is not just a mail client.

The spam checker alone is an ton of work. It needs to handle millions of mails for millions of users a day.

Nitpick: pretty sure both of those are in the billions.

Mails could even be in the trillions.

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