[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.