[znpy]

> The only thing they did differently was giving 5GB storage because they never needed to make money with it, as search was a money printer.

Uh, no, they gave 1GB at the time, when the most you would get was usually either 100MB or 250MB (i think that was what Hotmail was offering at the time?).

GMail was a game-changer at the time, though.

The search features were incredibly fast and super accurate, the UI would refresh immediately (AJAX before it was cool, essentially, nobody was doing that at the time) and their anti-spam was top-notch. Literally, spam was not an issue anymore.

Oh, and it was super fast and very lightweight: I had a P3 with 128MB ram at the time of launch, but it would still run incredibly well.

I managed to get an invitation from a friend, and I loved it.

Nowadays... It's almost saddening.