How Gmail happened: The inside story on its launch, ten years later | Hacker News Reader

How Gmail happened: The inside story on its launch, ten years later

time.com

184 pointstechnologizer67 comments

This doesn't show a full appreciation for gmail's timing.

Prior to gmail I had 4 (5?) different email addresses I moved through with different services. For lots of folks my age (~30) these email addresses we had predating gmail didn't mean anything. They weren't important, they were disposable. Gmail's release coincided with the time for many of us when email addresses starting becoming a thing that mattered. The release lined up with a general shift towards email as a first class communication mechanism.

Thanks to all of the things not covered in the email spec --- we are suffering from a bit of email lock in. We figured with phone numbers we needed to be able to take our phone numbers with us. They're a number people will use to communicate with us for the rest of our lives.

Email is similar, only it's not really practical to update everyone on your email address when you switch email providers. Some folks will argue that you can forward email from one address to another and reply from your new address - this isn't a real solution. You're still dependent on the intermediary solution. Not to mention that most people start typing in your name and just select the first auto complete address that shows up, so you'll have to always use the old service in case someone emails that address.

We really need innovation in email around some kind of portability. I have no idea how to design such a setup --- but right now it definitely feels like I can't leave gmail even if I want to. I have hundreds of people that know my email address as the only way to get in touch with me. I've signed up with my email address as my username at hundreds of sites at this point. Hell, half of those sites don't even let you change the email address of your account.

We're totally locked in.

-edit-

I see comments about using your own domain. While this is obviously a choice (and you can even use google apps for domains to interact with the address if you want) it's not a great solution for the masses.

Email is similar, only it's not really practical to update everyone on your email address when you switch email providers.

Actually that's dead easy as long as you have ownership of the email-address used.

If you have an email-address ending in a domain you don't own, yes you are indeed fucked, because you were naive enough to associate your digital identity with an object you have no ownership rights to.

If you however use a email-provider to provide email for your own domain, you own the address and are free to move between providers at no cost what so ever. Like I did, when I got fed up with Google.

You're not locked in. You can have full freedom with a simple $10 domain. What are you waiting for?

I agree, but that's the very definition of non practical. It doesn't work for 90% of the population. I feel like we should be searching, driving, for solutions that solve everyone's issue not use our issue. We are, for lack of a better word, the "digital 1%". Solutions for us don't necessarily work for everyone.

Somebody has to own and manage the 'namespace'. If it's not you, it is always going to be someone else.

I think this was one of the motivations for pobox.com. By being primarily a mail forwarding service, you can switch e-mail provider by simply forwarding to another address. The same is true for domains, since most registrars have pretty simple interfaces to set up e-mail forwarding.

The hard parts are dealing with SPF/DKIM (since they don't work well with forwarding) and e-mail migration.

Of course we were naive enough. Lots of people made these email addresses when they were in high school or earlier.

Changing it now is too big of a hassle.

I just use an email address on a domain I own and send/receive from/to that address from gmail.

That way if I change email provider it is transparent to people emailing me, and domain portability is a solved problem.

Could we not make this simple enough that everyone could do it?

Well, you locked yourself in. It's easy to buy your own domain name and use it with Google. Then you can switch to a different email system and take your address with you.

Even without giving up your Gmail address in the short term, you could move to Outlook.com, import all your Gmail, and use Outlook.com instead. You can also send Gmail from Outlook.com

Either way, you shouldn't have all your email in Gmail or any other service with no back-up. Set up email forwarding so copies of incoming emails are sent to a different address. Use Thurderbird (or whatever) so you have back-up copies on your hard drive.

> It's easy to buy your own domain name and use it with Google.

Consider historical context. It wasn't easy a decade ago.

It was. I had domains in ~2000 or so. And even then, many registrars then provided DNS servers, e-mail forwarding, web forwarding, etc.

That's easy for a moderately to highly technical person. The problem tseabrooks identified is exactly that it's not easy for everybody else--especially when that everyone else doesn't have a lens through which to view the potential problem.

Context: It's not so easy for everybody, but it's actually not hard. It's well within the capabilities of the average HN reader...

Fixing the problem for "the average HN reader" doesn't fix the problem.

True, but this was an HN post. It wasn't about everybody.

1&1 advertisements from the back of Wired magazine 10 years ago prove otherwise.

I'm lucky that the launch of Gmail happened when it did. I was a sophomore in college when I launched my first startup and I was tempted to use my .edu (my primary address at the time) or the @yahoo.com I had set up years before for random stuff. The pain of switching isn't something I've had to deal with fortunately.

I am glad that we still have email, and i don't wish any other way. Predicting the death of emails is a trend these days, but unfortunately, none of the replacements are based on standards. Think of all the services that want email to be dead - FB, Twitter, WhatsApp, Asana - none of them are based on open standards.

GMail is a great example, especially when it launched, that you can still innovate within the boundaries of standards. Twitter is a great example of what a great protocol/standard it could have been.

I tried to explain how disgusting I find the popularization of closed communication networks which are cancerous erosion into the free & reliable & disaster tolerant manner in which we communicate.

not sure if April Fool's joke...

not

When Gmail was launched, I was accessing it with my 1M broadband from China. But boy was it fast. Not just fast, it was clean, simple, pure. Hotmail, in contrast, was clumsy and cluttered and Microsoft was stuffing everything MSN related into it, MSN Space etc.

Ten years later I'm accessing Gmail, still from China, but with my 20M fiber-optic connection and yet it just won't open. (Certainly this has much to do with the government as well) But When I do get to open it, I see a cluttered interface with so much stuff I never use, Hangout, Google Plus, and so on.

Now who's the go-to simple and pure email service? Outlook.

Gmail these days is the mark of Google being an establishment.

Use the classic Gmail interface. It throws out all the Hangouts and G+ stuff and, for me at least, loads twice as fast. I've had it as my default for a while now. But you still get the advantage of Gmail's spam filter and image display.

For what it's worth, I do enjoy the full mobile Gmail client, though. The tabs are actually useful to me there because I can easily control how I get push notifications (only for Primary tab emails).

Really? Gmail is more pure than it's ever been IMO. Here's a screenshot I took today: http://i.imgur.com/iVZ306S.png (I've been using this account for 6-7 years.)

Chat has been apart of Gmail for a long time, and it's always been easy to turn it off. I barely even notice the Google+ integration, usually it's just pulling in profile stuff for the right sidebar.

Now, Gmail not opening quickly has been a common complaint for many years, and seems to usually (but not always) correspond to the account having a lot of mail (usually in archives.) But that's more of a complaint of using Gmail for years and years. Certainly, they should upgrade their architecture so it isn't as much of a problem.

Pure is pure, not stuff is hidden. Click on that 3x3 box of squares on the top right corner and take another screenshot.

Or click on the cog. What's the difference between settings and configure inbox?

Here's my screenshot. The red boxes are things in gmail by default that are NOT opt-in and are not in your screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/UGZbSky.png

Try to use Google's DNS: 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4

Absolutely, yes. I arrived in 2001 from Australia. Chinese internet was so fast then, faster than anything we had back home. The phenomenon you describe is due to particularly high packet loss, seemingly far higher on Google-related IP ranges: though routinely 20-40%, Google seems to be a bit higher, up to 60%. I have no proof of this other than personal observation across multiple devices and locations, but honestly it seems like a soft play by the government to punish Google. The best workaround is to use an out of country proxy over an SSH tunnel, or the same over OpenVPN over an SSH tunnel (I started seeing frequent disruption on OpenVPN links a few years ago, probably also due to packet loss. SSH handles this better).

I'm surprised this article doesn't place more emphasis on the surprising quality of GMail's spam filter. Especially in the early days it was a major differentiator from Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, maybe even more significant than the difference in storage capacity.

I still don't understand why the delayed email feature is not default.

I compose mail at midnight but want it to be sent only during the day. There is the Boomerang plugin but surely this should be default funtionality.

I don't think >90% of Gmail users would use that feature.

Sorry I had trouble parsing that. Do you mean that you think 90% would not use the feature, or do you think that the feature would be used by less than 90% (and is thus not worth being part of the default).

I think that over 90% would not use that feature.

buffer built an app on that feature for social media. surely there is a market for it except some folk may want to reverse it.

Compose mail aroun 9pm and send it at 1am to show they have been working all night :)

Look at that, it had threaded email conversations back then. Apple still can't get that on to work consistently (show both messages sent to you and your own replies in one thread) across OS X/iOS Mail and icloud.com. It only works in OS X Mail (after you change settings), but not the other two.

We had proper threaded email - far better than Gmail has today -- in the 1980s. Look, for example, at email in Ameol, written for the CoSy-based Cix conferencing system.

Threading not working properly is a result of some email clients not implementing the standard properly.

RFC 2822 [0] has clear definition on threading using In-Reply-To and References fields. Its precedent RFC 822 [1] had definition on In-Reply-To field.

However, not all email client implement this feature properly. As a result, there a lot of "conversational" messages flying around without proper In-Reply-To field.

To solve this, Gmail builds threading trees not only based on In-Reply-To and References fields, but also heuristically based on the subject line of emails. Outlook, on the other hand, ignores In-Reply-To and References fields and groups messages into threads solely based on subject lines (according to last time I checked).

And then, allowing (or requiring) emails to have similar subject lines to be properly threaded implicitly means it's OK for those client that don't produce proper In-Reply-To/References fields to continue doing so. Therefore, for any email client to properly thread all types of messages, it has to implement subject line based threading too.

Things would be much easier if everybody had faithfully implemented the standard.

[0] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2822.txt [1] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc822.txt

EDIT: added RFC links

Yes, I still remember discussions about email clients with this FreeBSD core developer trying to convince us at the time that Mutt is better than any graphical client, especially because of the way it handles threads.

To me at the time were empty words, why on earth I would wanna use a terminal-client in an HTML5 world?

Well now that Mail.app started giving me the creeps after the volume of email increased, I'm slowly reconsidering... And although will be a steep learning curve, I'm seriously thinking of switching to mutt...

I did this about a month ago and am still using it. mutt is the only thing that 1) I feel comfortable with; and 2) works with GPGTools.

Airmail would make a good alternative if it supported GPGTools :-(

I'm waiting for Mailpile[1] too.

[1] https://www.mailpile.is/

http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html

As much as the capacity or the search, I feel the UI of the original gmail was extremely well done and innovative -- I remember immediately preferring it to the dominant desktop clients of the time, Outlook and Thunderbird.

But sadly, over the years the design has been tweaked and evolved in ways that have lessened the originals snappiness and focus (a problem that appears to endemic to all of Google right now).

So now I'm back to mucking about with native clients, which, happily, do seem to be gaining momentum recently (and Gmail works fine as an IMAP backend, which is very kind of Google). (Though to add insult to injury, Google purchased and then abandoned one of most-promising native email client, Sparrow, which was not very kind!)

Thanks!

>> All along, though, Gmail’s creators were building something to please themselves, figuring that their email problems would eventually be everybody’s problems. “Larry [Page] said normal users would look more like us in 10 years’ time,”

This reflects a common meme around here - pg has mentioned it in essays for example, but I am getting old now, and I am no longer sure if geek culture is still scouting several years ahead of the mainstream, or if it is and I am just no longer keeping up.

Who is living tomorrow's world and what does it look like?

I will throw in

- remote working - video conferencing and mobile phones - scheduling a meeting with someone's web site not their email.

group chat in place of email

While I appreciate some aspects such as reliability, I have felt let down by other issues as the product has evolved. The big one being they suddenly tied gmail login to youtube, google search and other things. Activities I consider fundamentally separate activities from "emailing on the web".

Unwanted sign-in across services I consider unrelated, from a user point of view. Yep, cool technology and social media strategy and all, now how do I switch that feature off?

What we need is a checkbox: []'Gmail only sign-in', in settings, so when you open youtube in a new tab, you're not signed in automatically unless you choose to be.

And why is choice so unpopular in human user interface design these days? Why is 'opt-in' considered a barrier to business?

Ok ok, so 2004... I remember sending feedback into Google back then "we need a delete button". Google had been advertising as a feature that you "don't need to delete email ever", and you actually couldn't because there wasn't a delete button. They added one later, and you could even re-label it "bin" if you wanted. :-)

IIRC you could always delete, but for a long time it was only available from a pull-down menu that was not especially obvious. Finally they gave in and moved it to its own button.

I've dug a little more, and while it was possible to delete emails, you couldn't delete a whole folder at once. Looking back at comment threads from 2004, I can see a lot of people asking for a delete button and the option to delete everything in a label at once.

Also, my mistake.. the "trash" folder is renamed "bin" according to your English language setting (British vs US).

With Gmail–which was originally code-named Caribou, borrowing the name of a mysterious corporate project occasionally alluded to in Dilbert

Life imitates art!

I think Gmail was one of the first that put general acceptance of keeping things on the cloud. It was the first mail server that I didn't keep downloading to a local mail package.

Hotmail and Yahoo Mail did that many years earlier....

They did it, but my perception is people were still downloading to local clients. (At least I was, until gmail)

I remember when Gmail was fist launched. It was the future. We'd recovered from the dot com burst and I suddenly could see how this was going to work again. To use Gmail then you had to get an invite which was a bit of a problem. I asked around for days, if not weeks (can't remember) and when I finally signed up, I also had invites to give away. I think there where 10. Later this was set to 100 and eventually I was removed all together.

Today Gmail is a bit of a shadow of it former glory, after the Google UX nazis got their hands on it I guess...

For context, I was working at a minimum wage job when Gmail launched. I won an eBay auction for an invite a few weeks after launch for a whopping $36 -- something I thought there would be a good chance of eventually regretting.

Soon after I signed up, I received 5 or 10 invites, and flipped those on eBay the next day.

Other than the NSA funny business, I haven't regretted it one bit.

There’s a 24/7 culture, where people expect a response. It doesn’t matter that it’s Saturday at 2 a.m.–people think you’re responding to e-mail. People are no longer going on vacation. People have become slaves to email.

It’s not a technical problem. It can’t be solved with a computer algorithm. It’s more of a social problem.

Wouldn't a "do not disturb" feature that queues email in a hidden label until an appointed time work here?

Also don't most people who want instant responses use IM nowadays?

You never had someone email you and then phone you right away to confirm that you received the email? I myself was guilty of doing that before when I had a really urgent situation. Didn't realize what I was doing until I got called on it. But I see it happen unfortunately.

I wonder if Google has considered supporting Markdown in Gmail yet.

I switched to the basic Gmail just to look at how the good old Gmail felt like.

GMail was awesome, but it got worse as time went on. I now just use IMAP so I don't have to inconvenience myself with the web interface anymore.

But you still use it. I remember the struggle for catching invites and then the magic happened. Never used any other account from that.

Remember how we used Outlook before GMail because it was the only kid on the block? That's where we are at with GMail. The new mail experience hasn't been built yet.

Fastmail isn't free, but it has everything which made Gmail good in the first place. And since you're paying, you know email is the product and that you won't become collateral in a user-hostile Google+ like strategy.

For those interested in checking it out, feel free to use to use the following referral link while doing so.

http://www.fastmail.fm/?STKI=11413330

Obvious disclaimer: The link above is a referral link. I will benefit if you use it.

I have no knowledge of fastmail, but it's certainly possible to be both the customer and the product.

*Edit because of no markdown.

At the very least Fastmail is terribly fast :), which you immediately see when you're using their web interface. They keep hot and recent data on SSDs.

Also, since they actually implement IMAP correctly (they are one of the major contributors of the open source Cyrus IMAP server), things like MailTags work[1], whereas they don't on Google Mail.

The only thing that is missing are push notifications (e.g. via ActiveSync), but they are working on an app. In the meanwhile, using pushover is also an option.

They actually have a two month trial, so they're definitely worth trying out.

[1] http://www.indev.ca/MailTags.html

I moved from Gmail to Fastmail last month, and man is it nice. The import process smoothly pulled over 30K messages and folders over IMAP in a few hours. As an IMAP server behind iOS and Apple Mail, no problems at all, and their webmail UI is hands down the fastest cleanest Web app I've ever seen. Just stellar so far.

Not exactly ;-)

Many people used Hotmail (originally Hotmail) but many people also used Yahoo Mail (originally Rocketmail), which was generally as good or better.

Unfortunately for those people (eg me), Yahoo Mail is now unusably horrible while the new "Hotmail" is generally as good as Gmail and sometimes better. (The web interface is slower, but if you're concerned about speed then you're not using the web interface.)

It's a bit of a shame that outlook.com doesn't support CardDAV and CalDAV. But they do provide ActiveSync for mobile devices.

> But you still use it.

Out of inertia. I'm 'decoupled' from GMail interface wise. Unfortunately, everyone knows my GMail address, but it's slowly getting transitioned to my personal domain.

I had a Hotmail account back in the day, which was great, but switched to gmail pretty much day one (modulo timezone).

I remember quite a few acquaintances saying they would never switch to something like gmail because they wanted to have a 'real' address linked to a 'physical' service, so they used an account provided by their ISP. I wonder how many of them are still with the same ISPs.

> GMail was awesome, but it got worse as time went on.

Make that unbearable. Gmail getting messy and bloated coupled with Google's relentless push for Google+ was enough for me to move almost all my stuff off Google's services.

I did not find gmail to be that revolutionary. Yahoo mail, hotmail for email purposes were fine. The one thing Gmail did revolutionize was the amount of span and email chains you had to delete. Google Maps was revolutionary

Reply on news.ycombinator.com