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

This doesn&#x27;t show a full appreciation for gmail&#x27;s timing.<p>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&#x27;t <i>mean</i> anything. They weren&#x27;t important, they were disposable. Gmail&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;re a number people will use to communicate with us for the rest of our lives.<p>Email is similar, only it&#x27;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&#x27;t a real solution. You&#x27;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&#x27;ll have to always use the old service in case someone emails that address.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;ve signed up with my email address as my username at hundreds of sites at this point. Hell, half of those sites don&#x27;t even let you change the email address of your account.<p>We&#x27;re totally locked in.<p>-edit-<p>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&#x27;s not a great solution for the masses.

I am glad that we still have email, and i don&#x27;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.<p>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&#x2F;standard it could have been.

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.<p>Ten years later I&#x27;m accessing Gmail, still from China, but with my 20M fiber-optic connection and yet it <i>just won&#x27;t open</i>. (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.<p>Now who&#x27;s the go-to simple and pure email service? Outlook.<p>Gmail these days is the mark of Google being an establishment.

I&#x27;m surprised this article doesn&#x27;t place more emphasis on the surprising quality of GMail&#x27;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&#x27;t understand why the delayed email feature is not default.<p>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.

Look at that, it had threaded email conversations back then. Apple still can&#x27;t get that on to work consistently (show both messages sent to you and your own replies in one thread) across OS X&#x2F;iOS Mail and icloud.com. It only works in OS X Mail (after you change settings), but not the other two.

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.<p>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).<p>So now I&#x27;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!)

&gt;&gt; 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,”<p>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.<p>Who is living tomorrow&#x27;s world and what does it look like?<p>I will throw in<p>- remote working - video conferencing and mobile phones - scheduling a meeting with someone&#x27;s web site not their 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 &quot;emailing on the web&quot;.<p>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?<p>What we need is a checkbox: []&#x27;Gmail only sign-in&#x27;, in settings, so when you open youtube in a new tab, you&#x27;re not signed in automatically unless you choose to be.<p>And why is choice so unpopular in human user interface design these days? Why is &#x27;opt-in&#x27; considered a barrier to business?<p>Ok ok, so 2004... I remember sending feedback into Google back then &quot;we need a delete button&quot;. Google had been advertising as a feature that you &quot;don&#x27;t need to delete email ever&quot;, and you actually couldn&#x27;t because there wasn&#x27;t a delete button. They added one later, and you could even re-label it &quot;bin&quot; if you wanted. :-)

<i>With Gmail–which was originally code-named Caribou, borrowing the name of a mysterious corporate project occasionally alluded to in Dilbert</i><p>Life imitates art!<p>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&#x27;t keep downloading to a local mail package.

I remember when Gmail was fist launched. It was the future. We&#x27;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&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>Soon after I signed up, I received 5 or 10 invites, and flipped those on eBay the next day.<p>Other than the NSA funny business, I haven&#x27;t regretted it one bit.

<i>There’s a 24&#x2F;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.</i><p><i>It’s not a technical problem. It can’t be solved with a computer algorithm. It’s more of a social problem.</i><p>Wouldn&#x27;t a &quot;do not disturb&quot; feature that queues email in a hidden label until an appointed time work here?<p>Also don&#x27;t most people who want instant responses use IM nowadays?

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.

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