Hotmail was 10x worse than all alternatives. It was an ugly web page, not an app.
Gmail took XMLHttpRequest and its ActiveX fallback (we used to call this “comet”) and proved the world that we can ship a robust app inside a web browser.
It was well designed, had no ugly banners like Hotmail did, it was really fast, simple and working like a desktop app.
In terms of mailbox space, it was 500x Hotmail. Before Gmail you had to delete your old emails because if your mailbox was full it would stop receiving. The whole approach of "archive" and being able to search your entire email history from any computer in a webmail interface came from Google.
There was POP3 before this of course, to keep all your mail locally and empty out the server box. But that only works if you have a single computer that you check mail from. Even back in 2004 when Gmail launched that was a non-starter for me, I had email at home and at school.
Gmail was 100x Hotmail, if not even more than that. I think anybody who was on Yahoo Mail/Hotmail (or even something like Roundcube) who switched to Gmail probably realized how much these other companies had been holding stuff back.
I've never cared for invite only stuff, but Gmail really was a total revolution when it came out.
I thought the “invite only” approach was clever. It throttled growth so they could maintain a good user experience and limited automated use by spammers.
I don't use either but the hotmail/live/outlook system is a disaster.
I think people who have addresses there must just use them as throwaways as they don't seem to have much utility. You can be a small email sender with everything right, clean IP, on no block lists, SPF, DKIM, mta-sts. You can have no problems with any other major email provider. You can be signed up to SNDS. And they will just routinely block your IP for no reason and it will not even show up in SNDS and you can't resolve it through the tools they provide to mail senders on SNDS. So you have to go through this stupid process of filling in a support form which gives an automatic reply saying there is nothing to fix and you can't reply. But you do reply and then they fix it until next time.
There is no innovation there. I guess some accountant has determined that paying sweat shop labour to untick an IP every time their brain dead system blocks the same sender with no spam history is cheaper than actually fixing their systems. This is a flashback to 1990s Microsoft where their software was buggy as hell and your support options were power cycling or reinstalling.
They not only put their company name on this mess but offer it on outlook.com which creates an association with the pro email solutions they sell to a massive enterprise market. They should be embarrassed.
Gmail took XMLHttpRequest and its ActiveX fallback (we used to call this “comet”) and proved the world that we can ship a robust app inside a web browser.
It was well designed, had no ugly banners like Hotmail did, it was really fast, simple and working like a desktop app.