[KyleSanderson]

At the time when Gmail came out, Hotmail was offering 15MB of storage. Gmail, out the gate offered 1GB. For many, despite the mining, was a godsend to actually getting online and maintaining an inbox that didn't have to be cleaned weekly, if not earlier.

[nonrandomstring]

> Hotmail was offering 15MB of storage. Gmail, out the gate offered 1GB.

15 MB made you care what was in your folder. People deleted old messages and attachments. It was a communications tool first, and incidentally a storage service.

I was heading a small data storage company when Google brought out googlemail (later gmail). We lost all our customers almost overnight. You couldn't compete with 1GB of free storage. That's how people used it, almost immediately; want to store some files? Just email them to yourself at googlemail!

> despite the mining

Nobody knew about the mining. People trusted Google. News of the betrayal still hasn't reached some older folks.

Googlemail was a cultural turning point. It's where people stopped caring about their data, where it was, who took responsibility for it, or personally managing it. It may be the true birth of "The Cloud" as "your data on someone elses computer".

[ksec]

>Nobody knew about the mining. People trusted Google.

It was the era of Don't be evil. And people blindly trusted them.

[smeej]

Did Google even know they were going to be an ad company back then?

Internet advertising barely even seemed like a thing back in 2004, and I don't think anybody actually realized just how well you would be able to target advertising by systematizing all the world's information, never mind how much you would be able to charge for it, and how willing people would be to accept it.

This was the era of isolated banner ads that could barely even track clicks. I don't think people were wrong not to see where things were going back then.

[ksec]

>Did Google even know they were going to be an ad company back then?

Yes it was even listed on their IPO prospectus. They knew very early on it will be Ads. The only thing no one knew at the time was how big is the online ads market.

>and I don't think anybody actually realized just how well you would be able to target advertising by systematizing all the world's information

There were plenty ( including myself ). But no one gives a damn about it. Google's privacy issues were later reported in 2006 / 2007, and Steve Jobs went on to put more fuel into it, or I would even argue kick started the whole privacy angle in Silicon Valley.

[smeej]

Google went public in August 2004, so <5 months after Googlemail launched, which is what we're talking about here. And it's hard to criticize regular people for not seeing privacy issues in 2004 that weren't surfaced until 2006/7, especially when the average person barely knew how to use email.

I know 20 years doesn't seem like all that long ago, but no normal person had any expectation that they would be carrying a device in their pockets that reported their every move and conversation to a giant megacorp that sold their attention to the highest bidder. Not back then.

[akdev1l]

The gmail sign up page had a counter that continuously went up showing the number of bytes available for your mailbox.

It was glorious. I remember getting an invite for the beta from a random online forum.

[JamesLeonis]

Not only did GMail offer more storage, but its spam filter was light years ahead of all the competition. IIRC, Hotmail used to publicly publish every Hotmail user that signed up, making it a huge spam target. I had to clean out the spam daily or I wouldn't receive any new email. Moving to GMail was a life changing event.

GMail is my last bit of goodwill towards Google even as they shut down other services I used and paid for. When it goes, so will I.

[htrp]

The spam filter is going downhill now too

[xnx]

Hotmail's free limit might have been even lower, 2MB: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/2004/06/20/h...

[interestica]

Nah, it was 2MB. ! (Which is what I remember)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19000696

Contemporaneous discussion:

https://techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=19510

[jpalomaki]

This was a pretty big shift. From categorizing and labeling your stuff to the "big pile of junk". Just like how we moved from manually maintained topic based link lists (Yahoo) to generic search.

[chgs]

I remember the front page of the evening standard covering it, and commenting to a colleague how they had fallen for an April Fools. It’s was so ridiculous to have that much storage for free.

[addicted]

Gmail was announced on Apr 1. I vaguely remember people thinking the 1GB was a joke. And it was also advertised as “unlimited” where the space grew with every passing second.

[throw0101c]

> Gmail, out the gate offered 1GB.

Also was (IIRC) announced / released on April 1, so there was confusion as folks weren't quite sure if this was a real product or not ("1GB? Really?").

[frutiger]

> despite the mining

PSA they don’t mine paid customers (just like FastMail)