20 Years of Gmail (theverge.com) 86
Victoria Song reports via The Verge: When Gmail launched with a goofy press release 20 years ago next week, many assumed it was a hoax. The service promised a gargantuan 1 gigabyte of storage, an excessive quantity in an era of 15-megabyte inboxes. It claimed to be completely free at a time when many inboxes were paid. And then there was the date: the service was announced on April Fools' Day, portending some kind of prank. But soon, invites to Gmail's very real beta started going out -- and they became a must-have for a certain kind of in-the-know tech fan. At my nerdy high school, having one was your fastest ticket to the cool kids' table. I remember trying to track one down for myself. I didn't know whether I actually needed Gmail, just that all my classmates said Gmail would change my life forever.
Teenagers are notoriously dramatic, but Gmail did revolutionize email. It reimagined what our inboxes were capable of and became a central part of our online identities. The service now has an estimated 1.2 billion users -- about 1/7 of the global population -- and these days, it's a practical necessity to do anything online. It often feels like Gmail has always been here and always will be. But 20 years later, I don't know anyone who's champing at the bit to open up Gmail. Managing your inbox is often a chore, and other messaging apps like Slack and WhatsApp have come to dominate how we communicate online. What was once a game-changing tool sometimes feels like it's been sidelined. In another 20 years, will Gmail still be this central to our lives? Or will it -- and email -- be a thing of the past?
Teenagers are notoriously dramatic, but Gmail did revolutionize email. It reimagined what our inboxes were capable of and became a central part of our online identities. The service now has an estimated 1.2 billion users -- about 1/7 of the global population -- and these days, it's a practical necessity to do anything online. It often feels like Gmail has always been here and always will be. But 20 years later, I don't know anyone who's champing at the bit to open up Gmail. Managing your inbox is often a chore, and other messaging apps like Slack and WhatsApp have come to dominate how we communicate online. What was once a game-changing tool sometimes feels like it's been sidelined. In another 20 years, will Gmail still be this central to our lives? Or will it -- and email -- be a thing of the past?
Email will not go away (Score:5, Insightful)
It just works far too well. I do have idiots trying to contact me on teams, for example, and then wondering why I respond 10 days later or not at all.
Re:Email will not go away (Score:4, Interesting)
But for that purpose, you need to be using email not gmail: the former is reliable (either delivers to the target or returns failure), while the latter keeps randomly losing mails from any server other than Google itself.
Re:Email will not go away (Score:4, Interesting)
That has not been my experience at all. After 20+ years of paying for e-mail hosting I got tired of price increases and shitty, unreliable service. 2 years ago I switched to exclusively using GMail accessed via POP3 and I have had zero problems. Their spam filters work well, I get every e-mail that is sent to me, and everything has worked smoothly..
It does make me a little nervous though. There's no profit in free e-mail and a lot of expense in maintaining a system that works reliably for hundreds of millions of users. At some point corporate greed is going to take over, just like it has for everything else.
Re: Email will not go away (Score:2)
Is it free? I thought their motivation was mining your email for data to use to feed your ads. That data is valuable.
Re: Email will not go away (Score:2)
Re:Email will not go away (Score:5, Interesting)
keeps randomly losing mails from any server other than Google itself.
I've been using Gmail since 2004, and cannot remember a single time an email has been "randomly lost". Occasionally there's a spam false positive, but that's about it.
Re:Email will not go away (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Email will not go away (Score:5, Interesting)
"randomly lost" means Google decided to stick the email in one of its categories that you don't check.
Well, for the last several months there's also the category "Google decided it's going to reject legitimate email when the SPF/DKIM/DMARC bits don't meet with Google's blessing". Which nowadays might even include *any* message that's been forwarded.
I'd much rather they just pass it through but add a prominent warning at the top. Strip attachments if they really insist, but let the basic message go through.
Gmail sucks.
You'll get no argument from me, other than probably s/Gmail/Google/.
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I think there are a few things in play here.
1) Google has probably decided - internally - that it really only cares about Google-to-Google email. As such, it is willing to break email with every other email provider, if necessary, in pursuit of this next item.
2) Google's engineers (among others) keep trying to come up with an effective technical solution to what is fundamentally a sociological problem.
3) Google is unwilling to look at any solution that might impact its Gmail ad revenue.
Now my own ideas will
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"randomly lost" means Google decided to stick the email in one of its categories that you don't check
I turned off categories the moment they appeared, so this has not been an issue for me. Everything plops into one inbox, and I sort/delete from there, as I always have.
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Ah, yes, the gmail idiots. These people do really not understand how to run or configure an email server. When I had to configure SPF for my own domain because gmail now insists on it (some of my family members use gmail), I had to find out how to bypass the gmail SPAM filter in order to get error messages about SPF errors. Apparently these assholes count failed SPF as a high SPAM score and give you a SPAM bounce instead of an SPF error message unless you send a very non-SPAM message. Cost me several hours
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Ah, yes, the gmail idiots. These people do really not understand how to run or configure an email server.
Perhaps they understand, but just don't care. 'Customers' who know enough to realize that losing a few emails isn't inevitable - or who even care enough about it - are probably an edge case for Google. And Google really doesn't care about those folks. Advertisers always prefer the ignorant and gullible, who are easier and less costly to fleece.
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Well, "never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity". But you are right, these Google people could indeed just be malicious, and Google does not care.
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Catch up! It's 2024. If you don't properly configure SPF, DKIM, & DMARC, you can expect trouble sending email to almost modern email provider.
Email is the wild west & these mechanisms/band-aids are an unfortunate necessity in today's world.
Hosting your own MTA today is a thankless pain in the arse, I'll give you that. If you want a tip, have a look at sending through AWS SES [amazon.com]. It costs like $0.01/1k emails & deals with all of that crap for you. Since adopting it, I've never again had problems get
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You seem to be functionally illiterate. And quite stupid on top of that. I was quite rightfully complaining about nonsensical/malicious error behavior. Apparently you were unable to understand that from a very clear explanation.
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Wow, classy. Well if you want to be an arse...
Apparently I touched a nerve with the keyboard warrior who can't even configure fucking SPF, a decades old standard whose simplicity is matched only by OP's own apparent technical competence.
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But for that purpose, you need to be using email not gmail: the former is reliable (either delivers to the target or returns failure), while the latter keeps randomly losing mails from any server other than Google itself.
Especially when Cloudflare is involved. No bounce. Just dropped - sometimes.
Re: Email will not go away (Score:1)
Gmail will drop e-mail if you donâ(TM)t have proper DNS records for all the anti spam measures they have implemented. O365, CloudFlare and various other legitimate services recently did the same and it is actually very good because it drops third party mailers like SurveyMonkey and everything else some random HR or sales drone wants to use without alerting them their marketing campaign goes straight to /dev/null
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Just because it is a large bank means nothing, it is more than likely that one team clicked a button to 'expand' their SMTP servers in the 'cloud', didn't tell their security group (because those guys always take so long) and the IPs/public keys from those servers just aren't in the list of DKIM/SPF/DMARC etc.
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while the latter keeps randomly losing mails from any server other than Google itself.
It is not even reliable for that. Recently, I have had two people send me email based on me giving them my email address. Both are GMail users. Both emails ended up in the SPAM folder. I get about 2 gigabytes of SPAM per day. Those messages were lost. The only way I was able to find them was by asking for their email address to search with. I was using a GMail account for both of those interactions.
Re: Email will not go away (Score:3)
On top, email is an open protocol. Zero silo. A rare feat these days.
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Indeed. A sad state of affairs.
gmail is searchable! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:gmail is searchable! (Score:4, Informative)
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>Apple mail also is searchable,
sort of.
I use it as my primary, but searching beyond a word or two doesn't work *nearly* as well as it is described.
But then again, gmail has "bad search days", less now than it used to, where certain words just don't hit, and you have to remember another uncommon word from the email you want to find.
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What do you mean "via Google"?
Google solidified their presence (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Google solidified their presence (Score:2)
Remember "Never delete another email"? (Score:5, Interesting)
....Pepperidge Farms remembers.
Most of my Google Drive is 'email'. Not many 'large' emails, just 180k worth (down from ~220k).
I switched to Gmail, and kept using mail software (RIP Outlook Express, best program ever), just letting everything store in Gmail as an archive. (Lots of email lists 'back in the day'.)
Now trying to figure out how to delete 'some' emails, but not all, sitting at about 90% of my Google Drive full. (Managed to blast out about 40k, but lots that are a bit more tricky to filter.)
Fun fun, thanks for that initial 'promise'..
Oh, and still prefer folders to tags...
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Some people do delete emails. It sound like a monumental endeavor, however this article explains that's not necessarily so [arstechnica.com], and how to do it.
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Now trying to figure out how to delete 'some' emails, but not all, sitting at about 90% of my Google Drive full.
Demand your money back ;) Or pay for more storage to not have to think about it.
Seriously though, it's not too hard. You can search by date ranges, sender, recipient, body, and subject substring matches (both has and doesn't have), size, labels, with or without attachments ...
Pretty easy to find, say, all 6000 of your Pepperidge Farms marketing emails (yes, I got your reference but couldn't resist) and then delete them. Rinse and repeat for other stuff you don't want to keep.
Nostalgic millennials are funny (Score:3)
At my nerdy high school, having one was your fastest ticket to the cool kids' table. I remember trying to track one down for myself. I didn't know whether I actually needed Gmail, just that all my classmates said Gmail would change my life forever.
I can't wait to start hearing Gen Z go on about how fondly they remember their first iPhone 4.
For me (a middle-aged "Xennial"), Gmail was just "Oh, Google's getting into another thing they'll have in perpetual beta and then get bored with. *shrug*" I eventually signed up for one and it's neither here nor there, I still don't use it as my primary e-mail, it's just my login for when I have to deal with the various other services Google runs.
Re:Nostalgic millennials are funny (Score:4, Informative)
Your age is clearly messing with your memory. Gmail came out a good while before Google gained its reputation for perpetual betas & product cancellations.
Managing your own MTA is a PITA, and Gmail has provided the longest running service that works well. It might not have so much of an edge today, but on top of its revolutionary amount of storage (for the day), it's always had one of the best spam filters.
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I do remember it being in beta for quite a while before creating an account, so my initial impression was just that I already had an email provider, so why bother. Then my later impression was, "why is this damn thing still in beta?" I didn't actually sign up for a Gmail account until early 2010, and by that time it officially was out of beta.
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I've had my account since 2004. Not the earliest, but it was still invite only at the time. It kept the "beta" moniker until 2009, however it was more of a in-joke by that point.
Prior to that, most people used yahoo, hotmail, and various ISP provided addresses, but all of those had trouble with spam & being tied to an ISP was problematic.
At that point, paid email was usually far more restrictive - charging per address and per MB.
If there's a service that pre-dates Gmail, and at the time provided more re
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GMX beat Gmail by over a year. At the time I recall noting that Gmail was stealing their business model and marketing plan. GMX still exists. I prefer it to Gmail.
Re: Nostalgic millennials are funny (Score:1)
Longest running?
I've used an email service since before Gmail and it has always worked well.
Re: Nostalgic millennials are funny (Score:1)
The perpetual beta was already a meme, they had cancelled some minor services and everyone kind of accepted they were never good enough for anyone to be used. Gmail kind of accelerated the Internet going from geeks to everyone because you no longer needed to install a mail client and mess with servers and ports, and although some had offered it before, webmail was until that point not very useful. After Gmail people started lapping up the web based beta software as production which is when a service cancell
They just finished killing Gmail classic (Score:5, Interesting)
Somewhat ironically, they just finished killing the last bits of Gmail classic, which was more or less their original user interface. Basic HTML and light weight enough it could be used over dial-up as well as with less capable web browsers.
I was still accessing Gmail classic via an old Firefox until a couple of weeks ago it finally started forcing a redirect.
I still miss the original UI (Score:4, Interesting)
The UI used to be so clean and lightweight and efficient and ergonomic. I miss old Gmail. Still convenient but worse than it was.
I got my account when it was still invite only. It's hard to explain how vastly superior it was to any webmail that preceded it. It really was mind-blowing.
Got in on the original beta (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Got in on the original beta (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Got in on the original beta (Score:4, Interesting)
I finally had to give up on gmail for the same reason. Everyone seemed to think it was theirs and for every unsubscribe I went through, 3 more got added. I still get people's mortgage statements, rental agreements for storage units, food order receipts, etc. The most annoying part is someone used it to sign up for a Playstation account and Sony refused to do anything about it. Their system required two-factor so I couldn't just force a password reset and delete the account, and they wouldn't delete it because I wasn't the person who created it. It basically permanently banned me from creating an account with my own email address.
Re: Got in on the original beta (Score:2)
You might be able to create an account by using your address with dots added, since gmail ignores them but they should be treated as part of the ID.
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Mine is pretty entertaining sometimes. Class lists from schools, one woman who signed me up for notifications from her home security system. Some shady development company even shared their whole dropbox with me once.
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Mine is pretty entertaining sometimes. Class lists from schools, one woman who signed me up for notifications from her home security system. Some shady development company even shared their whole dropbox with me once.
Yea. My favorite was when somehow attorneys for a major software company decided my address was for one of the outside attorneys and added me to their distro list.
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Mine is pretty entertaining sometimes. Class lists from schools, one woman who signed me up for notifications from her home security system. Some shady development company even shared their whole dropbox with me once.
Oh yeah. My favorite was the Florida real estate agent who apparently made lots of very friendly lady friends wherever he went.
I finally tracked him down just out of curiosity and he thought it was hilarious. He had accidentally had a batch of business cards made up with "his" (i.e. my) firstlast@gmail.com.
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I was early enough that my last name alone is still my primary email. When my kids were born 2000 and 2003, I created semi anonymous emails as their first name and middle name. I just made those forward to me until they were old enough to take over (with a few years of oversight/redundancy too). What I didn't realize was that my son's first and middle name would be a huge match for a generic first/last. I got so many emails with so much confidential info across many actual people with that name. It really w
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I was early enough that my last name alone is still my primary email. When my kids were born 2000 and 2003, I created semi anonymous emails as their first name and middle name. I just made those forward to me until they were old enough to take over (with a few years of oversight/redundancy too). What I didn't realize was that my son's first and middle name would be a huge match for a generic first/last. I got so many emails with so much confidential info across many actual people with that name. It really woke me up to the weakness of email when not validating addresses. So many interesting attachments.
It was interesting, but today with all the spam/malicious files I simply delete them even if it looks like a legit misdirected email.
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I didn't want a first/last, as it would seem too obvious for spammers. Although I turned around made first/initial/last for my kids with the invites.
I just looked back, and it seems that barely an hour after it went live, I filed bug #11562493 on the lack of etiquette education for users in signup . . .
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I didn't want a first/last, as it would seem too obvious for spammers. Although I turned around made first/initial/last for my kids with the invites
I hear ya, but I figured spammers would just ad number to the end to hit as many addresses as possible. I guess I could have used Joe.Btfsplk@gmail.com. What gets me is how many people, and even websites, don't realize xxx.yyy and xxxyyy @gmail are the same address.
.
I just looked back, and it seems that barely an hour after it went live, I filed bug #11562493 on the lack of etiquette education for users in signup . . .
It's been that way since eternal September...
Web (Score:1)
Welcome email (ca. 10/2004) (Score:5, Interesting)
First off, welcome. And thanks for opening a Gmail account. We hope that Gmail will become something you use everyday.
Gmail is different from other types of email, so we put together some information to help you get started. But you're probably eager to start playing around with your new account, so we'll keep it short. (After all, you can always come back to this email later—just search for it.)
*Check out our Getting Started guide. It'll introduce you to many of Gmail's features.
*Visit our Help Center to search for answers, browse frequently asked questions, and learn about the cool things you can do with Gmail.
*Import your contacts from Yahoo! Mail, Outlook, Hotmail, and others to Gmail. Email your friends to tell them your brand new Gmail address.
You may also have noticed some text ads or related links to the right of this message. They're placed there in the same way that ads are placed alongside Google search results and, through our AdSense program, on content pages across the web. The matching of ads to content in your Gmail messages is performed entirely by computers; never by people. Because the ads and links are matched to information that is of interest to you, we hope you'll find them relevant and useful.
We're working hard during our limited test to improve Gmail and make it the best webmail service around. Thanks for taking the plunge with us. We hope you enjoy Google's approach to email.
Thanks,
The Gmail Team
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You may also have noticed some text ads or related links to the right of this message. They're placed there in the same way that ads are placed alongside Google search results and, through our AdSense program, on content pages across the web. The matching of ads to content in your Gmail messages is performed entirely by computers; never by people. Because the ads and links are matched to information that is of interest to you, we hope you'll find them relevant and useful.
Gotta love that friendly/creepy implicit agreement that advertising is fun and helpful, and that there's nothing in the least problematic about them mining your email contents for better targeting of said advertising.
Oh, to be living in the mid-Oughties again! /sarc
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Gotta love that friendly/creepy implicit agreement that advertising is fun and helpful, and that there's nothing in the least problematic about them mining your email contents for better targeting of said advertising.
Oh, to be living in the mid-Oughties again! /sarc
To be fair, they did promise not to be evil! ;-)
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But did they pinkie swear?
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I don't think I got one; I can't imagine that I would have deleted it.
I *think* that I paste in my invite, and it was all web, but I'm really not sure any more.
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Yeah, when did Google stop including inline advertising? I've had my Gmail account for only 5 or 6 years, but I don't ever remember seeing advertising.
I switched to a different provider (Score:4, Informative)
I hate basically everything about gmail. Other than the reliability, the UI and filters are honestly terrible. I'm forced to use it at work (in the web interface), and good luck getting it to filter multiple exact strings, and it definitely can't filter anything based on X-header information. It's a wonder to me that it can be so bad and still be so ubiquitous, but it's big and free and has momentum and it does have extremely good uptime.
I had their free hosting for many years, and I'm glad I pay someone else to do it now. People are so used to how bad gmail is they don't realize that life can be better. (That said, I don't know what the other free options are like; I presume that they have similar limitations.)
Let's not go overboard with kudos (Score:2, Troll)
>"but Gmail did revolutionize email."
How? I was there. I didn't see anything revolutionary about Gmail compared to other Email options. When Gmail came out, Hotmail (for example) had already been available for many years. It was free, it was fully web-based, and was no less usable or capable. Same with Yahoo. (I still have and use accounts on both). And both evolved continuously.
>"It reimagined what our inboxes were capable of"
Worst UI ever, and still is, if you ask me.
>"and these days, it's
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>"but Gmail did revolutionize email."
How? I was there. I didn't see anything revolutionary about Gmail compared to other Email options.
As stated in the blurb, they offered a 1GB mailbox in a time where 15MB was the norm and you might have a family-shared mailbox of 50MB. PC's could be fitted with a whopping 300GB hard drive, and that was on the large end of the spectrum.
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So it was larger storage than typical for a while. I don't see how that is revolutionary.
Gmail only revolutionized email... (Score:4, Insightful)
... if your only experience with email has been web email. And to be fair, for a bunch of 20- to 30- year olds, that may very well be true.
My first impression of gmail was "wow, this is a great webmail client". But soon it became "this sucks compared to a dedicated email program"... and that's still my impression, even today.
Nowadays I'm forced to use either Gmail or O365 mail at work. Fortunately, though, Gmail still supports IMAP.
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"Fortunately, though, Gmail still supports IMAP." - Yep, when this ceases to happen I'll part ways.
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I used exmh, procmail and fetchmail for a long time.
exmh was a wrapper w/ a GUI around the MH mail system. It was written in tcl/tk, had lots of add ons and activity. There was one that would see how you moved files from your inbox and start moving them for you (1998 I think)
Procmail was an amazing filtering system. I wish gmail filtering was anywhere close. I especially miss being able to edit it in a text editor and have the order mean something. I was even able to run a small mailing list with it.
Th
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Fortunately, though, Gmail still supports IMAP.
Just barely. For me it keeps complaining that IMAP is "unsafe" and will stop playing with Thunderbird for no reason, then I have to jump through hoops again to re-enable IMAP. It's enough of a pain in the arse that I'll probably migrate soon and just give Protonmail a few bucks a month to handle my email. Gmail is the last Google product I still use, so it will be lovely to be able to declare my life completely google-free.
Inbox was better (Score:1)
I miss the Inbox UI. That was the last time I used my Google email address in anger. I might even have been tempted to drop my for-£ fastmail subscription. When they dropped Inbox, I upped my fastmail plan instead.
There's one feature that is valuable, though, and that is the integrated translation feature. It is very convenient. Not for me, but for a family member. It's difficult to find in the UI, but that's Gmail for you.
No CD (Score:1)
Still the best spam filter anywhere (Score:2)
No other spam filter comes close to the accuracy of GMail's spam filter. At work, where they use Microsoft 365, I get spam emails several times a day, and it falsely flags a good number as well. GMail, at least in my experience, almost never gets it wrong. And when it does, the issue is quickly fixed. Spam filtering alone will keep me using GMail for years to come.
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No other spam filter comes close to the accuracy of GMail's spam filter. At work, where they use Microsoft 365, I get spam emails several times a day, and it falsely flags a good number as well. GMail, at least in my experience, almost never gets it wrong. And when it does, the issue is quickly fixed. Spam filtering alone will keep me using GMail for years to come.
That must be nice. For me, Yahoo mail does a better job of blocking spam than Gmail. I still get 3-4 spam emails a week on Gmail, often from Gmail addresses, usually with a PDF attachment done up to look like a receipt for an iphone or bitcoin. I've never bought either, and they originate from within google's own ecosystem. Seems to me this should be a piece of cake for google to filter out, so I can only conclude that they don't give a shit.
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I'm glad to hear that Yahoo has improved. I used to have a Yahoo email account, and got nothing *but* spam at that address, literally from the moment I created the address.
I do get an occasional spam through GMail, though only one every couple of weeks or so. But nothing like Outlook at work, where I get several per day.
Not bothering to organize archived messages (Score:2)
THIS is my favorite feature of GMail. For years, I haven't bothered to organize emails into folders. I haven't had to, because it's so easy to find things with a quick search.
Was genius marketing too (Score:2)
Instead of persuading people to try it, they made it an in-crowd, invite only club. And they were big enough to pull that off.
beta tester (Score:2)
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Heh, that must have been Gmail ALPHA, because the beta launched in early 2004.
Late with Google, early with Gmail (Score:2)
I remember being relatively late to the Google party, sticking still to Altavista at the time. But when GMail came out I almost immediately signed up. I still have archive mails from when I started with that service, quite a trip down memory lane. GMail was revolutionary 20 years ago, but didn't improve that much, I must say.
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I, too, clung to Altavista.
But it became untenable when google just plain out-indexed Altavista.
come to think of it, it was the ability to perform more sophisticated searches that left me clinging to altavista to the bitter lost cause end.
hawk