[wlesieutre]

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.