9mo ago

20 years of Gmail

www.theverge.com 20 years of Gmail

Will it still be here in another 20 years?

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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...
  
  WOULD YOU LIKE TO SIGN IN? SIGN IN. SIGN IN. SIGN IN.
  How about no means no, Google?
  
  It certainly was cool and popular from day one. However, it was also spyware from day one. Tech magazines wrote reviews about it, but the hype train was going so fast at the time that people somehow ignored the privacy aspect.
  Nowadays people are beginning to realize just how evil it has always been.
  
  but the hype train was going so fast at the time that people somehow ignored the privacy aspect.
  The privacy aspect was vastly overshadowed by the leap in performance. I was tempted to the dark side for a few years because FF performance was rather bad and chrome was super performant. I ended up switching back a bit before the proton release and have only used it or edge as a more open browser for when I have to use a browser that doesn't block everything.
- 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. :)
  
  Many websites prevent providing aliased Gmail address, how you're planning to address that issue?
  
  I use a dash (hyphen) instead of a plus. It’s worked everywhere I’ve tried it. You can still use a plus if you want, but the address it shows for a label in the UI is with a dash.
  
  That looks... surprisingly promising
  
  Interesting idea. I signed up for the waitlist. I keep considering hosting my own email server but it’s a huge pain in the ass just like BIND can be
  
  This looks nice but my worry is itll be gone in a year or two and then i lose access to accounts and important emails and people are emailing a non existing email. Any step y’all take to prevent this?
  
  I’m funding the project myself, and I should be able to fund it for many years. Of course the goal is to become profitable, and that will mainly be done through business and enterprise accounts. I’m working on a custom domain feature though, which would allow you to bring your own domain. That way, you could ensure that your email addresses will always be yours.
  
  Would've could've should've.
  
  Signed up for the waitlist, it sounds interesting.
  
  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.

89 comments