When Gmail first appeared in 2004, the idea of having what seemed like a never-ending space for email was revolutionary. Most paid services were providing a few megabytes of space, and here came Google promising a full gigabyte (which, at the time, seemed huge) for free.
Over the years, however, Gmail has added a plethora of features that it touts as “improvements” but some of them are irritating. Worse, it looks for ads for things that it will never need and sticks them at the top of email list.
Back in the dark ages before Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and other free cloud-based apps, most email happened either via paid services or inside of walled gardens. In the former, you paid a service provider for an email account and downloaded your email into an app that only lived on your computer — an app with a name like Pine, Eudora, Pegasus Mail, or Thunderbird.
For the most part, nobody was scanning your email to find out the last time you bought shoes, or whether you were shopping for car insurance, or that you had recently been buying gifts for a relative’s new baby. Nobody was taking that information and selling it to vendors so they could drop ads into your email lists or surprise you with additional promotional messages. Your email lived on your computer alone. Once it was downloaded and erased from the server, it was just yours — to save or erase or lose.
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Who else doesn’t see ads in Gmail? I never have and have been using it since its inception.
(and got royally pissed at Google for sunsetting its cool Inbox app).
inbox was amazing! closing down the project radicalized me against everything google touched from that point forward lol
Fr. I was so upset when they axed inbox. I found an alternative, but iirc you can’t bring your own email or something like that.
How people will accept having their entire lives scanned, categorised and sold off to the highest bidder is beyond me. Fastmail - or any other paid product - for the win.
emails
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Oh Barbara. For someone absent on ‘mass nouns’ day in elementary school, you’ve come far.
People who complain about the fact that “emails” is an incorrect plural form, even if it’s incredibly common and accepted, and sometimes language evolves and changes, should be sure that they write it ‘E-mail’, and also don’t forget to capitalize Internet!
And Hotmail deleted all my emails after not signing in for some period, twice. Then, I just stick with gmail since the early days until now.
I’m still using gmail, but reading it trough the same old school local clients downloading everything trough imap. For everything important i have tutanota and private servers. Proton indeed looks like honeypot to me.
Isn’t the linked article just a puff piece that says nothing substantial at all?
Eudora! I had forgotten all about that one.
Ctrl+F: “thread” “conversation” zero results
I feel like people have forgotten how email worked before, when webmail providers were emulating the desktop client model of “received messages go in Inbox, Sent folder is for sent.” Gmail’s conversation view was shockingly intuitive, one of those “why hasn’t it always been this way?” things that feels so obvious in retrospect.
I have always used conversation view in my desktop email client. Not sure why you think this is revolutionary or exclusive to gmail.
I turned that off so many years ago I forgot it exists.
Yeah, abjectly hate conversation view.
Odd not a single mention of hotmail in there the original web based email service which arguably was the one of the prime options till gmail offered way more storage.
Don’t forget Netscape mail.
But hotmail / outlook.com still exists… Does netscape mail?
Labels were a pretty simple yet novel concept for categorizing mail which i seldom see in any other provider, sadly.
Fastmail has them, they’re better than gmails and they import cleanly once you migrate away from gmail.
Proton has labels & folders both.
Incidentally the same labels make Gmail fundamentally incompatible with the way IMAP works causing lots of weirdness whenever you use any standard email client not specifically designed for Gmail.
