[airstrike]

Outlook Web Access is absolute horseshit compared to OG gmail. Sure, it was JS-driven, but it wasn't good.

The apps you mentioned had nowhere near the impact that Gmail had in terms of showing what was possible

[omegabravo]

GMail had a massive impact, but I didn't really think it was novel from a technical JS perspective. It was really basic, and loaded fast. It had excellent fast search and very good junk mail rejection.

Most email providers had approximately 100Mb mailbox limit (I can't remember specifically), but Gmail had 1Gb.

[city41]

To me it was Maps in 2005 that really showcased what JS could do.

[wolco]

It was novel to release gmail at that scale in javascript. It hasn't been done before. 1Gb was a crazy size.

Anybody remember gmail invites?

[wyclif]

I remember Gmail invites. Ironically, Evan Williams (formerly of Twitter, now of Medium, at the time working at Google after they bought Blogger) was the person who sent me mine—and on the morning of April 1st, 2004. So I've had a Gmail account since the first day it was publicly available.

[treebornfrog]

Yes, had one from an uncle.

I then realised that I could invite a second account, so I created a handful of accounts and still own them today.

Good times.

[airstrike]

I actually got an invite from Google because I was on blogger.com back then (sad to admit it...)

I probably could have picked [e-mail] were it not for the 6 letter minimum, so ended up with [e-mail] which still yields an absurd amount of messages meant to a variety of other recipients...

[Semaphor]

Sure, I bought one off ebay for 0.10€ :D