[mseebach]

> Email was meant to be

Email isn't a religion and originalism isn't a meaningful framework for analysis.

Email started as a simple answer to a simple question, and has evolved from there to answer increasing hard questions. The original inventors totally failed to anticipate many important realities about email (most significantly, spam, but also encryption and signing), and email has evolved to deal with that.

You're free to keep using email as you believe it should be used, but you have no right to insist that other people hold back in adopting new ways of doing things that they feel suits them better.

[heavenlyblue]

> increasing hard questions

Over the past, what... 30 years? - e-mail remains what it had been in the first place: a protocol for exchanging messages.

You're still sending text. You're still attaching links to your messages if you'd like to send a large file. You're still trying to keep concise in your comm.

What have evolved, exactly? Sans encryption - that's not really a "hard question". Gmail's a great spam-free platform, but it doesn't add anything revolutionary.

[mikeash]

Being spam free was revolutionary when Gmail was new. It also revolutionized email by offering enough space that you could actually keep an archive. When most providers offered maybe 10MB, Gmail offered 1GB.

If those don’t sound revolutionary today, it’s only because Gmail revolutionized things so hard that everyone had to jump on board.

[heavenlyblue]

You're only seeing it from one perspective: from the perspective of a single non-power user - yes, Gmail made the difference.

But in terms of proper e-mail usage: be it through MS Exchange, University campuses, corporate servers - they made no difference. Everyone already had enough space there anyway, and spam filters <mostly> worked - as they had enough email volume to detect attack. And they still use these systems.

[daveFNbuck]

I switched to gmail after losing my college account upon graduation. I'm sure my college is still using this system, but it's not available to me. Neither are the corporate e-mails for jobs I've left. For personal e-mail, almost everyone is a single non-power user.

[Yetanfou]

I worked as a service developer at a large telco in Europe, building - among other things - mail infrastructure. If there was one thing I would not have uttered in that context it would have been '...proper e-mail usage ... through MS Exchange'. We fought tooth and nail to be able to have 'proper email' despite the insistence of corporate to use MS Exchange. In the end we ended up with two machines on each desk, one of them for the sole purpose of communicating with those parts of the company which used MS Exchange.

Things might be less bad nowadays, I don't know. What I know about MS Exchange is enough to keep away from it.

[mikeash]

As a university user at the time, it certainly wasn’t my experience that everyone already had enough space, or that spam filtering worked.

[twblalock]

> You're only seeing it from one perspective: from the perspective of a single non-power user - yes, Gmail made the difference.

That's the perspective of most people. They are not power users, they don't have the technical ability to deal with complicated email systems, and they just want something free that works well.

Your concept of "proper" email usage doesn't cover most of the population.

[toopsss]

> Everyone already had enough space there anyway

Lol my 100mb before the uni (National top 30 research) switched to gmail was definitely plenty of space. And google should have just hired the $7/hr freshman that configured spamassassin instead of wasting all that money on Postini. You’re funny; don’t quit your day job though.

[coldtea]

>Over the past, what... 30 years? - e-mail remains what it had been in the first place: a protocol for exchanging messages.

The difference is (a) those messages started to measure in the hundreds or thousands per day, not 5 of them at most like in the eighties, (b) people started using it for all kinds of work collaboration and organization. Not just some academics exchanging ideas.

[heavenlyblue]

So what collaborative features unique to Gmail does the organisation you work for currently actively uses?

PS: please do not say "Hangouts", as Hangouts are only loosely integrated with Gmail. These are two separate systems and it does seem they are still unsure if these two should be merged together.

[coldtea]

Why do they have to be "unique to Gmail"? The parent's argument was that email is the same thing for 30+ years.

Several mail programs have added integrated calendars and notifications, email snoozing, labels, classification into buckets, context, and so on -- including basics like search.

And of course there are the apps and plugins -- e.g. Asana within Gmail and the like.

[twblalock]

Good spam filters, tags instead of folders, and a lot of storage were the features Gmail brought to the table, for free, that made it so popular.

It was also a nicer web interface than the competition -- so nice that it managed to get a lot of people to use it instead of desktop mail clients, which were the norm at the time.