9mo ago

20 years of Gmail

www.theverge.com 20 years of Gmail

Will it still be here in another 20 years?

89 comments

Being a bit nostalgic, but Gmail was such a leap forward when it was released. In a world where everybody took the shittiness of hotmail for granted, using Gmail was like peeking into the future. In many ways it was.
Now Gmail is that shitty hotmail we took for granted.
- Feels somewhat familiar, doesn’t it.
  
  That, and Chrome was cool when it came out, now it's just evil...
- What's the new Gmail?
  
  I personally swapped over to Proton Mail recently. Exporting over all saved email, groups and labels from Gmail was easy. I love it so far, it's very similar to how Gmail works. I've set Gmail to forward everything to my new one so I don't need to go to back very often.
  The only bugbear I have currently is while multi-selecting emails in the inbox, then open one up to read it and back out, the selections aren't remembered. But they are pushing improvements all the time, so I'm sure that will be fixed with time.
  
  Port87? (At least I hope, because I made it. :)
  
  I'm looking at Tuta. It's not free (well, they have a crappy free tier), but it's cheap, is end to end encrypted (as much as email can be), has extra address support, and supports custom domains. So if I hate it, I'll switch to something else (maybe ProtonMail). The initial switch from my Gmail will suck, but it'll hopefully be a one-time thing.

20 years on, I still prefer folders instead of labels. And I still don't want messages group as "conversations."
It used to be free 1GB of mailbox storage that kept expanding for free. Now there is a hard limit unless you pay.
- I’ll just leave this here.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
  
  claw back that value!
  
  Did you read the article you referenced?
  Or maybe I'm just not seeing the connection.
- It used to be free 1GB of mailbox storage that kept expanding for free. Now there is a hard limit unless you pay.
  I don't think anybody expected that to last forever. That said, the free limit is still way more than enough for most people. I've got 20 years of emails in my account, and I'm just barely past my free limit.
- Everything else wrong with Gmail and Google aside, those are the least reasonable complaints? You can use labels as folders. You can also disable conversation grouping, but I doubt you go more than a week before turning it back on.
  
  Yes, a label is just a more versatile folder. If you don’t like that, you can just use a single label per email, but I genuinely can’t see any value in that. But you can if you want.
  
  Do I need to write comments that represent what you feel?
- It used to be free 1GB of mailbox storage that kept expanding for free.
  Within a week you could tell there was a set maximum, the speed of increase steadily fell the higher the storage value got. It was a good marketing ploy, but there was never a “forever expanding” promise made.
- What if a message covers 2 different topics?
  IMHO the entire OS should be based around files and labels, not files and folders.
  
  On Linux file systems it basically is. A file name is just a label for an inode, and the same inode can have as many file names as you want.

From the comments on the article:
There was this brief shining moment when we had Google Now and Google Inbox and, at least for me, they were incredibly useful tools. Then they transformed into a content chum box and a stale email platform respectively and, while I think I know why, I’ll never understand WHY.
I feel this so hard. Inbox was so great and being forced back into old-school Gmail was so disappointing. RIP Inbox.
- This.
  I'll never forgive Google for killing Inbox. Of all the projects they killed, that one hurt the worst. I went from being able to actually manage my email to it turning right back into an unmanageable mess overnight, and in spite of their promises, not a single one of Inbox's features that enabled this were ever implemented in main Gmail.
  That was a big turning point for me in being able to trust them for anything
  
  I always wished for Inbox to simply become the new interface for Gmail. My wishes were destroyed once it got discontinued.
- There was a brief moment between Jelly Bean and Kit Kat in which Google Now and Inbox made being tracked by Google kind of useful in everyday life
  
  Until the idiots all complained about it being 'creepy'. Ever since the tracking completely continued, but no longer with any benefit to us.
  Great job idiots. Why people just don't opt not to use features they find 'creepy' I'll never understand. They are only satisfied if they bring it down for everyone.

Anyone got an invite? 😅

I remember how excited I was when I finally got an invite code. Now happily gmail-free for 2 years.
Google Maps and YouTube I can’t avoid but otherwise ungoogling successfully.
- I’m mostly over on ProtonMail but I don’t know if I’ll ever be comfortable fully deleting my Gmail :/
- btw you can use freetube or libretube for youtube, and use an openstreetmaps clientt to replace google maps
  
  What I am really looking for is beyond our email, it's proper integration between calendar, contacts, and map.
  I want to be able to share calendars with my family, and link contacts from certain events (birthdays, meetings, and also just meet-ups). I want those contact's addresses to be available as navigation destinations in the mapping app. I want to be able to bookmark ("star") map locations.
- I wish osm+ was as good as maps. It's so close and I'll still use it for in town destinations.
  
  Have you given a try to Organic Maps ? It is more friendly than OSMAnd Although, it still lacks a better search bar I think.
- What do you do for mobile?
  
  I use proton mail but otherwise I would probably stick with the default iOS.
  I self-host caldav with radicale and use native Debian/ios calendar apps. Immich to replace Google photos was especially satisfying.

20 years of surveillance by Gmail...

I remember when getting an invite was such a big deal.
- $100/pop on eBay. At the time, Hotmail inboxes had a storage limit of 2 MB.

11 years of ProtonMail let's goo

Gmail is still good for me at least. Does everything I want, doesn't need new features and I don't see ads or anything.
What more would I get from someone else? I'm not going to pay for privacy at end of day.
- Well if you're not going to pay for privacy, you won't get it either 😂
- Same. Got no real reason to move away from it, and for all the shit people give it, you weren't there when it came out. We were drowning in spam about nob pills.
- But maybe you would pay for the service of someone else doing all the server stuffs and software development on your behalf? If you’re a paying customer, the company should also respect you and your privacy.
  On the other hand, if you’re using the service for free, then the incentives suddenly shift towards you being the product.
  
  "If you aren't paying for the product then you are the product" doesn't apply anymore.
  Nowadays, even if you do pay for the product, you are still the product, as companies see more money on the table and will go for it.
  
  No I wouldn't pay for the services of someone else when I can get it for free.
  I'd pirate it if I could though?

It is way past time for the US government to offer their citizens email that is not owned by a private company and used as a tool to steal your private information.
This private-public partnership that controls all of our banking and communication is pure bullshit. It is basic services the government should provide. Instead we have private companies either charging us exorbitant fees or turning us into the commodity.
Meanwhile the government has complete control and can tell them to stop servicing us at any time and there is no redress. The government can literally tell your bank to stop doing business with you and you have no rights. Plus, being a private company, they can also stop servicing you because they happen to have a hair up their ass today.
There is no real choice anymore and the consumer always gets screwed. We really fell down the privatization well of removedation and it does not look like we are clawing our way back up anytime soon.
- If the government can get your current email or bank account shut down, why do you think they couldn’t/wouldn’t do that on a government-provided one?
  
  You would have actual rights and redress with a government agency plus when someone hacks the government's data it would be a big deal and people would go to prison instead of a private company just shrugging their shoulders and saying oh well.
  The government would not need to sell your data. The government would not be able to just change terms of service on a whim. The government would be mandated to provide the services without having to enshittify services later on to capitalize on profits.
  The current system of the government calling the shots but not being held responsible should come to an end and these basic services should be provided as a right. To think that private companies can literally destroy your life by removing your ability to bank or communicate and not be held responsible is beyond ridiculous.
- Have you seen government owned IT systems? No thanks.
  
  Yeah I get the old adage about government run programs. While a cute stereotype I would like to remind you if it wass not for the US government the Internet as we know it would not even exist.

Back in the days that was awesome. I had some kind of shitty Hotmail like German mail provider. 100MB storage, lots of ads. Google pushed into the right direction, almost unlimited storage, at first no ads. This was a huge step forward for email back then. Anyways I ditched Gmail and most of their services years ago, paying for mailbox.org for years, never looked back.

From the article:
When you have enough storage that you never have to delete anything, you can keep an infinite record of your life. Packages, receipts, itineraries of past trips, messages from loved ones, photos, appointments, documents — you can just label them, archive them, and search for them later.
I don't want Google to have that information for free, to analyze/monetize/sell to 3rd parties. That's one of the reasons why I quit GMail. It was difficult too because I was registered to literally 100s of websites with that address.
- This is where I got lucky. I'm up my Google workspace for free still (grandfathered in) and I can just switch my MX record whenever I feel the need to no impact. I'll keep my same email address since it's under a custom domain.

20 years of making billions from users private data.
- George, is that you?

Is Gmail still the preferred email address to use on resumes?
- I'd say if you have your own domain, that's probably the most preferred route to go. But otherwise, Gmail is probably the best, appearance-wise, of the free mainstream options out there.
- was it ever? I participate in interview rounds at my company (several tech screens a month) and I must say a candidate's email was not something that drew attention

I was very excited to get an invite shortly after it's opened and I still have all the emails that tell me my friend XYZ accepted my invitation to Gmail.
It was a time when getting a Gmail invitation wasn't trivial.
Here's a video recalling how exciting it was to have a Gmail.
Nowadays it's different and possibly less good, but searching in Gmail is still very easy, which is awesome
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  Here's a video recalling how exciting it was to have a Gmail.
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
- I think I got mine via some kind of lottery system back in the day. I used to be a big fan of Google back in those times. Was amazing to have 1000mb.
- The search has been broken for me for a while. I get better results in the iOS mail app. Searching from within gmail will just flat out not show old results.
  
  When I look for things on Gmail on my laptop, I get detailed and complete results, when I do the same on the Gmail app, it seems like I get all results up to maybe two years ago (and it doesn't show the rest). This second thing is really annoying, but at least on the computer version I always get everything

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