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I think people have forgotten or weren't around back then.

gmail did away with the idea of folders and instead had tags. They were very clearly an innovation on top of how most organization happened with email.

granted, those tags were shunted into folders for the IMAP protocol, but if you were using the web UI it was a whole other world.

The rest of the world caught up, but at the time they were absolutely groundbreaking. yahoo and hotmail existed at the time but neither had anything on gmail.