[xorcist]

None of these things were new, more inbox space and better spam protection were available for real email services. But the point of every other free email service at the time, including Hotmail post acquisition, was to upsell you their paid service.

They were therefore crippled in these ways, and purposefully limited to a storage space just large enough to be useful if you went to the trouble of cleaning out large emails regularly. They were also plastered in ads in every way imaginable.

Gmail was a long bet that Google could, with a bit of help from Moore's law, finance a premium email service using the same methods they financed their search engine.

This strategy could absolutely win again, in a market where crippled consumer tools exists for the upsell. For example entry level project tools could easily be something Google could integrate with their office tools. Or indeed if Google crippled their office tools in their ad financed version, someone else could use this strategy against them.

[shakna]

> None of these things were new, more inbox space and better spam protection were available for real email services. But the point of every other free email service at the time, including Hotmail post acquisition, was to upsell you their paid service.

Hotmail and the like required a US address and credit card for their premium service, though.

They weren't options where I was. And nor is it the norm anymore.

[xorcist]

You were simply not part of their business model. The point is that their competitors were all freemium. It's not that their competitors were technically incompetent and didn't know how to buy storage or build spam filters but that they were crippled on purpose.