This is a bit of a weird piece. It's a short history of Gmail, presumably to mark their 20th anniversary. However the only content actually related to the title is: "Google used to scan emails for...
This is a bit of a weird piece. It's a short history of Gmail, presumably to mark their 20th anniversary. However the only content actually related to the title is: "Google used to scan emails for targeted ads, but they stopped doing so in 2017". That seems a bit weak as a premise, and I think most people following tech probably already knew that.
So they're giving a history, putting a privacy spin on it, and then circling back to talk about the cool new features Gmail offered at the time. It feels a bit like they've glued two different articles together, but neither had anything interesting to say on the subject.
That's how it goes with headlines. They're often chosen by the editor, not the writer. On Tildes, someone could change it to reflect the content better.
That's how it goes with headlines. They're often chosen by the editor, not the writer. On Tildes, someone could change it to reflect the content better.
I feel like this is a bit misleading. Before Gmail, everyone's email account was either tied to another free provider, "free" as part of their internet service provider's plan, or "free" from...
I feel like this is a bit misleading.
Before Gmail, everyone's email account was either tied to another free provider, "free" as part of their internet service provider's plan, or "free" from their business or university. Google didn't come along with the carrot of free email, they were competing with email being basically free for everyone.
That's not a defense of how they quietly monetized your inbox data, but they didn't condition anyone for free internet services. That was the field in which they were, and still are, playing.
The reason people signed up in droves for it was that google was awesome. It worked so much better than everything else. We all assumed that their mail was going to be the same. Little did any of us know that google would be the dollar store garbage bin of search engines in 20 years.
I remember the big being you got 1GB of mail storage when Gmail launched. That was HUGE. I remember myself and many others using POP to download our email since most ISP emails had very limited...
I remember the big being you got 1GB of mail storage when Gmail launched. That was HUGE. I remember myself and many others using POP to download our email since most ISP emails had very limited storage. I don't recall what something like Hotmail had at the time, but it was definitely substantially less.
I think Hotmail launched with 2 MB of free space in 1996 [source]. They upped it to 250 MB at the time of Gmail's launch. The other major player in the 90s, RocketMail, I think had something...
I don't recall what something like Hotmail had at the time, but it was definitely substantially less.
I think Hotmail launched with 2 MB of free space in 1996 [source]. They upped it to 250 MB at the time of Gmail's launch.
The other major player in the 90s, RocketMail, I think had something similar, but I can't find the exact figure. When Gmail launched, it was upped to 100mb, although by then it had also become Yahoo! Mail.
So yes, I also remember Gmail's 1 GB being an insane offer. It felt like you could never reach that limit. But then again, 2 MB also felt perfectly adequate back in 1996. And now I'm using something like 15 GB on my work Gmail account.
I remember my sense of wonder when there used to be a little counter for storage space that would incrementally increase over time. Then at one point Google decided that they were going to put a...
I remember my sense of wonder when there used to be a little counter for storage space that would incrementally increase over time.
Then at one point Google decided that they were going to put a combined per-user storage cap for every one of their services, and I only really discovered when it happened and they rather unceremoniously sent me a letter telling me that I was over that limit. That got rid of any of that magical feeling that may have been left.
I remember meticulously deleting old emails to make sure I stayed under the 2MB Hotmail quota, slowly because I was on dial-up, with a big banner ad at the top of the screen for DVDs-by-mail from...
I remember meticulously deleting old emails to make sure I stayed under the 2MB Hotmail quota, slowly because I was on dial-up, with a big banner ad at the top of the screen for DVDs-by-mail from this weird new service called Netflix.
I didn't get on to Gmail right at launch, but I did get on when it was still invite-only. I remember that not only was there 1GB of storage, but when I joined they were actively increasing the...
I didn't get on to Gmail right at launch, but I did get on when it was still invite-only. I remember that not only was there 1GB of storage, but when I joined they were actively increasing the amount of storage available to everyone and there was a ticker-counter that would constantly update to show you just how much storage you had available at any given moment. Sometimes I'd just watch it for a while to see the number grow.
I really liked that counter too. This thread made me curious about how much space we'd have if it had continued, and I found this article that lists some of the numbers. At a rate of 123.36 MB per...
I really liked that counter too. This thread made me curious about how much space we'd have if it had continued, and I found this article that lists some of the numbers. At a rate of 123.36 MB per year, we would have gained nearly 3 GB of space by now! I guess the counter was not increasing nearly as fast as it seemed, and it was just easier to give everyone a flat 15 GB, than to pretend to have an ever increasing limit.
Interesting, I've got 17 GB now. When I look at the subscription storage options it says I'm on the free 15 GB plan, so I wonder what I did to get the extra storage. Probably some one-time offer...
Interesting, I've got 17 GB now. When I look at the subscription storage options it says I'm on the free 15 GB plan, so I wonder what I did to get the extra storage. Probably some one-time offer for something I did ages ago. I kind of bought into their whole ecosystem wholesale a number of years ago, though I guess I'll have to see if that turns out to have been a bad idea.
When you wrote that "it worked so much better than anything else," at first I thought you were talking about Gmail. The competition has gotten better since then, but I don't think Gmail has gotten...
When you wrote that "it worked so much better than anything else," at first I thought you were talking about Gmail. The competition has gotten better since then, but I don't think Gmail has gotten worse?
For sure I meant google's search was awesome. That's an interesting thought about gmail's standing vs other providers. I was a beta gmail user and I feel like its mostly the same as it was then....
For sure I meant google's search was awesome.
That's an interesting thought about gmail's standing vs other providers. I was a beta gmail user and I feel like its mostly the same as it was then. Things have come and gone, as google does, but I would struggle to name anything "new" they've done, apart from modernizing the look a bit over the years.
Maybe the auto calenderizing of emails that are appointments or flights or w/e. Though, this is part of what the article is complaining about.
I wouldn't say gmail got worse, but they definitely removed features and options that some users enjoyed. for mobile apps, many swore by Inbox, but Google shut that down while it barely came out...
The competition has gotten better since then, but I don't think Gmail has gotten worse?
I wouldn't say gmail got worse, but they definitely removed features and options that some users enjoyed. for mobile apps, many swore by Inbox, but Google shut that down while it barely came out of beta.
But the bigger issue is that consumer email is more an obligation than a "valuable service". I need an email for pretty much any website I actually want to use. I basically get an email if I want to use any Google service whatsoever, from Google Drive, to youtube, to Fitbit or any of the dozen services they acquired over the years. And emails are semi-required for contact if you are applying to any job (I wouldn't be surprised these days if college applications ask for an address).
None of these are thing I want to have to do. like physical mail I check it, clear out 90% spam, check out the 1 auto-generated rejection letter, and move on. Not necessarily something I "value" per se,
Inbox being shuttered is doubly tragic. To build Inbox, Google bought up the native Mac Gmail client Sparrow which was as nice as one might expect a boutique indie mac app to be (nicer than the...
Inbox being shuttered is doubly tragic. To build Inbox, Google bought up the native Mac Gmail client Sparrow which was as nice as one might expect a boutique indie mac app to be (nicer than the Gmail web interface in many ways), shuttered it, and then had its devs build Inbox.
So it’s not just Inbox that got axed, but also Sparrow.
GMail has gotten worse, it loads really slow for me these days. I know it's not a "me" problem, because the redesign that made it slow even added a very pretty loading animation. I use Fastmail...
GMail has gotten worse, it loads really slow for me these days. I know it's not a "me" problem, because the redesign that made it slow even added a very pretty loading animation.
I use Fastmail now. It gets me to my inbox in about 1/10 the time.
I guess I don't see it much because I have Gmail in a pinned tab? But I also wonder what else is going on, because I've seen other complaints, but it doesn't seem universal. Could the browser or...
I guess I don't see it much because I have Gmail in a pinned tab? But I also wonder what else is going on, because I've seen other complaints, but it doesn't seem universal.
Could the browser or browser extensions be affecting it?
I use Firefox. It's already been shown that Google makes YouTube run slower for Firefox users. An easy fix is to change your User Agent string to look like Chrome, which also proves that the slow...
I use Firefox. It's already been shown that Google makes YouTube run slower for Firefox users. An easy fix is to change your User Agent string to look like Chrome, which also proves that the slow behavior on Firefox is intentional and not the result of some deficiency in the browser itself.
I should clarify that by "slow" I mean "10-15 seconds" to go from a new tab to my inbox. Not the end of the world, but Fastmail consistently loads in less than 5.
This isn't really a fair test since it's fast hardware, but for me it's less than a second in either Firefox or Chrome on an M2 Mac mini. (I hadn't used Firefox before on this machine, so it...
This isn't really a fair test since it's fast hardware, but for me it's less than a second in either Firefox or Chrome on an M2 Mac mini. (I hadn't used Firefox before on this machine, so it wouldn't have anything cached.)
I recommend creating a new browser profile and trying it that way, just in case there's a difference.
It's also possible it has gotten better. I haven't actually used GMail in a few years at this point, and I have no reason to go back. I like my new email provider.
It's also possible it has gotten better. I haven't actually used GMail in a few years at this point, and I have no reason to go back. I like my new email provider.
Is there actually a problem with this? They're offering you a service for $0. You're paying for the service with your data being used to feed you relevant ads. There are many, many email providers...
Is there actually a problem with this? They're offering you a service for $0. You're paying for the service with your data being used to feed you relevant ads. There are many, many email providers out there (including Google with Google Workspace) where you can pay for email with no ads and no scanning.
But how were they monetized then? A forced ad bar at the top of your email client so you had to see ads, or on your website so anyone who visited would. They weren't free, they were just being...
But how were they monetized then? A forced ad bar at the top of your email client so you had to see ads, or on your website so anyone who visited would. They weren't free, they were just being paid for with ad views in a different way.
Or they were "free", but actually just included with your internet service so you couldn't see the cost or easily change providers.
Free as in beer =/= Free as in freedom. But I think the bigger point was that there was no alternative premium email service to use if you cared about privacy. There definitely isn't a semi-known...
Free as in beer =/= Free as in freedom. But I think the bigger point was that there was no alternative premium email service to use if you cared about privacy. There definitely isn't a semi-known premium email service to this day, Plenty of more niche services, but nothing really caught on.
The services were much simpler back then. The internet has gotten incredibly complicated, and therefore more expensive to run and maintain. Google has to pay hundreds or thousands of developers...
The services were much simpler back then. The internet has gotten incredibly complicated, and therefore more expensive to run and maintain. Google has to pay hundreds or thousands of developers six-figure salaries to maintain and improve on that service. Mail is actually one of the more difficult services to run nowadays because of having to continually combat spam and deal with a plethora of security issues, both for the service provider and for their customers.
Running a web-scale application for millions of users is very expensive today. If you think it should be free, there's nothing stopping you from standing up your own mail server and offering it as a service to the general public.
I run e-mail and the most difficult thing about it is dealing with Google's and Microsoft's random, temperamental spam blocking constantly breaking everyone else's stuff for no reason, regardless...
I run e-mail and the most difficult thing about it is dealing with Google's and Microsoft's random, temperamental spam blocking constantly breaking everyone else's stuff for no reason, regardless of how unwarranted. Conversely, I get more spam through in my gmail than spamassassin lets through in my (older) non gmail address. Something went very wrong a long time ago.
I think the general issue is how intentionally poorly this trade is communicated. Much like cigarette packages, imagine a world where Google were forced to be crystal clear about what "free"...
I think the general issue is how intentionally poorly this trade is communicated. Much like cigarette packages, imagine a world where Google were forced to be crystal clear about what "free" really means and how many people they would scare off using their services.
If it was a honest "poor me, I also have bills to pay, please see this and", it would be perfectly okay but it's known their shady practices go way beyond that.
I don't know that you can be 100% sure about any service, but for my money, I've been very happy with MXroute. I can host unlimited accounts across unlimited domains (storage is the primary...
I don't know that you can be 100% sure about any service, but for my money, I've been very happy with MXroute. I can host unlimited accounts across unlimited domains (storage is the primary limit). The plans are reasonable and the service is everything you'd need to administer your email. The owner is a no–nonsense, no–bullshit BOFH–style sysadmin, but he runs a tight ship, and my mail never gets bounced, which is harder and harder to do outside the big services these days.
For people living where US Dollars and Euro are expensive, Zoho mail is a good service and very cheap. It offers e-mail, a little cloud storage and office apps.
For people living where US Dollars and Euro are expensive, Zoho mail is a good service and very cheap. It offers e-mail, a little cloud storage and office apps.
I have been paying $5 a month for over 20 years for the privilege of Google NOT being able to scrape my inbox. Im either a fool or wise, not sure, but I'm starting to pepper my emails with the...
I have been paying $5 a month for over 20 years for the privilege of Google NOT being able to scrape my inbox. Im either a fool or wise, not sure, but I'm starting to pepper my emails with the words 'adult diapers' to see if my ad algorithm starts to change lol.
That's hilarious. I am curious though, how do the recipients of your emails react to that? And do you work it into the message somehow or perhaps finish with "adult diapers" like a signature at...
That's hilarious. I am curious though, how do the recipients of your emails react to that? And do you work it into the message somehow or perhaps finish with "adult diapers" like a signature at the end of your email?
This is a bit of a weird piece. It's a short history of Gmail, presumably to mark their 20th anniversary. However the only content actually related to the title is: "Google used to scan emails for targeted ads, but they stopped doing so in 2017". That seems a bit weak as a premise, and I think most people following tech probably already knew that.
So they're giving a history, putting a privacy spin on it, and then circling back to talk about the cool new features Gmail offered at the time. It feels a bit like they've glued two different articles together, but neither had anything interesting to say on the subject.
That's how it goes with headlines. They're often chosen by the editor, not the writer. On Tildes, someone could change it to reflect the content better.
I feel like this is a bit misleading.
Before Gmail, everyone's email account was either tied to another free provider, "free" as part of their internet service provider's plan, or "free" from their business or university. Google didn't come along with the carrot of free email, they were competing with email being basically free for everyone.
That's not a defense of how they quietly monetized your inbox data, but they didn't condition anyone for free internet services. That was the field in which they were, and still are, playing.
The reason people signed up in droves for it was that google was awesome. It worked so much better than everything else. We all assumed that their mail was going to be the same. Little did any of us know that google would be the dollar store garbage bin of search engines in 20 years.
I remember the big being you got 1GB of mail storage when Gmail launched. That was HUGE. I remember myself and many others using POP to download our email since most ISP emails had very limited storage. I don't recall what something like Hotmail had at the time, but it was definitely substantially less.
I think Hotmail launched with 2 MB of free space in 1996 [source]. They upped it to 250 MB at the time of Gmail's launch.
The other major player in the 90s, RocketMail, I think had something similar, but I can't find the exact figure. When Gmail launched, it was upped to 100mb, although by then it had also become Yahoo! Mail.
So yes, I also remember Gmail's 1 GB being an insane offer. It felt like you could never reach that limit. But then again, 2 MB also felt perfectly adequate back in 1996. And now I'm using something like 15 GB on my work Gmail account.
I remember my sense of wonder when there used to be a little counter for storage space that would incrementally increase over time.
Then at one point Google decided that they were going to put a combined per-user storage cap for every one of their services, and I only really discovered when it happened and they rather unceremoniously sent me a letter telling me that I was over that limit. That got rid of any of that magical feeling that may have been left.
I remember meticulously deleting old emails to make sure I stayed under the 2MB Hotmail quota, slowly because I was on dial-up, with a big banner ad at the top of the screen for DVDs-by-mail from this weird new service called Netflix.
I didn't get on to Gmail right at launch, but I did get on when it was still invite-only. I remember that not only was there 1GB of storage, but when I joined they were actively increasing the amount of storage available to everyone and there was a ticker-counter that would constantly update to show you just how much storage you had available at any given moment. Sometimes I'd just watch it for a while to see the number grow.
I really liked that counter too. This thread made me curious about how much space we'd have if it had continued, and I found this article that lists some of the numbers. At a rate of 123.36 MB per year, we would have gained nearly 3 GB of space by now! I guess the counter was not increasing nearly as fast as it seemed, and it was just easier to give everyone a flat 15 GB, than to pretend to have an ever increasing limit.
Interesting, I've got 17 GB now. When I look at the subscription storage options it says I'm on the free 15 GB plan, so I wonder what I did to get the extra storage. Probably some one-time offer for something I did ages ago. I kind of bought into their whole ecosystem wholesale a number of years ago, though I guess I'll have to see if that turns out to have been a bad idea.
When you wrote that "it worked so much better than anything else," at first I thought you were talking about Gmail. The competition has gotten better since then, but I don't think Gmail has gotten worse?
For sure I meant google's search was awesome.
That's an interesting thought about gmail's standing vs other providers. I was a beta gmail user and I feel like its mostly the same as it was then. Things have come and gone, as google does, but I would struggle to name anything "new" they've done, apart from modernizing the look a bit over the years.
Maybe the auto calenderizing of emails that are appointments or flights or w/e. Though, this is part of what the article is complaining about.
I wouldn't say gmail got worse, but they definitely removed features and options that some users enjoyed. for mobile apps, many swore by Inbox, but Google shut that down while it barely came out of beta.
But the bigger issue is that consumer email is more an obligation than a "valuable service". I need an email for pretty much any website I actually want to use. I basically get an email if I want to use any Google service whatsoever, from Google Drive, to youtube, to Fitbit or any of the dozen services they acquired over the years. And emails are semi-required for contact if you are applying to any job (I wouldn't be surprised these days if college applications ask for an address).
None of these are thing I want to have to do. like physical mail I check it, clear out 90% spam, check out the 1 auto-generated rejection letter, and move on. Not necessarily something I "value" per se,
I loved Inbox. I was so sad when Google axed it.
Fortunately, Inbox has been resurrected outside of Google under the name Shortwave. It's great!
Do you know if Outlook accounts can work with it? I hate outlook, but I'm not going to create a new email address to get a better experience.
It's GMail-only. Sorry. :(
Inbox being shuttered is doubly tragic. To build Inbox, Google bought up the native Mac Gmail client Sparrow which was as nice as one might expect a boutique indie mac app to be (nicer than the Gmail web interface in many ways), shuttered it, and then had its devs build Inbox.
So it’s not just Inbox that got axed, but also Sparrow.
GMail has gotten worse, it loads really slow for me these days. I know it's not a "me" problem, because the redesign that made it slow even added a very pretty loading animation.
I use Fastmail now. It gets me to my inbox in about 1/10 the time.
I guess I don't see it much because I have Gmail in a pinned tab? But I also wonder what else is going on, because I've seen other complaints, but it doesn't seem universal.
Could the browser or browser extensions be affecting it?
I use Firefox. It's already been shown that Google makes YouTube run slower for Firefox users. An easy fix is to change your User Agent string to look like Chrome, which also proves that the slow behavior on Firefox is intentional and not the result of some deficiency in the browser itself.
I should clarify that by "slow" I mean "10-15 seconds" to go from a new tab to my inbox. Not the end of the world, but Fastmail consistently loads in less than 5.
This isn't really a fair test since it's fast hardware, but for me it's less than a second in either Firefox or Chrome on an M2 Mac mini. (I hadn't used Firefox before on this machine, so it wouldn't have anything cached.)
I recommend creating a new browser profile and trying it that way, just in case there's a difference.
It's also possible it has gotten better. I haven't actually used GMail in a few years at this point, and I have no reason to go back. I like my new email provider.
Is there actually a problem with this? They're offering you a service for $0. You're paying for the service with your data being used to feed you relevant ads. There are many, many email providers out there (including Google with Google Workspace) where you can pay for email with no ads and no scanning.
This argument always pops up, but email and other websites has been free long before the age of commercial mass surveillance.
But how were they monetized then? A forced ad bar at the top of your email client so you had to see ads, or on your website so anyone who visited would. They weren't free, they were just being paid for with ad views in a different way.
Or they were "free", but actually just included with your internet service so you couldn't see the cost or easily change providers.
Free as in beer =/= Free as in freedom. But I think the bigger point was that there was no alternative premium email service to use if you cared about privacy. There definitely isn't a semi-known premium email service to this day, Plenty of more niche services, but nothing really caught on.
The services were much simpler back then. The internet has gotten incredibly complicated, and therefore more expensive to run and maintain. Google has to pay hundreds or thousands of developers six-figure salaries to maintain and improve on that service. Mail is actually one of the more difficult services to run nowadays because of having to continually combat spam and deal with a plethora of security issues, both for the service provider and for their customers.
Running a web-scale application for millions of users is very expensive today. If you think it should be free, there's nothing stopping you from standing up your own mail server and offering it as a service to the general public.
I run e-mail and the most difficult thing about it is dealing with Google's and Microsoft's random, temperamental spam blocking constantly breaking everyone else's stuff for no reason, regardless of how unwarranted. Conversely, I get more spam through in my gmail than spamassassin lets through in my (older) non gmail address. Something went very wrong a long time ago.
Same here. Also most spam email addresses have include the gmail.com domain, by a considerable margin.
I think the general issue is how intentionally poorly this trade is communicated. Much like cigarette packages, imagine a world where Google were forced to be crystal clear about what "free" really means and how many people they would scare off using their services.
If it was a honest "poor me, I also have bills to pay, please see this and", it would be perfectly okay but it's known their shady practices go way beyond that.
I don't know that you can be 100% sure about any service, but for my money, I've been very happy with MXroute. I can host unlimited accounts across unlimited domains (storage is the primary limit). The plans are reasonable and the service is everything you'd need to administer your email. The owner is a no–nonsense, no–bullshit BOFH–style sysadmin, but he runs a tight ship, and my mail never gets bounced, which is harder and harder to do outside the big services these days.
Wasn't familiar with MXroute,looks pretty solid. Personally I have been using mailbox.org and have been pretty happy with it.
For people living where US Dollars and Euro are expensive, Zoho mail is a good service and very cheap. It offers e-mail, a little cloud storage and office apps.
I have been paying $5 a month for over 20 years for the privilege of Google NOT being able to scrape my inbox. Im either a fool or wise, not sure, but I'm starting to pepper my emails with the words 'adult diapers' to see if my ad algorithm starts to change lol.
That's hilarious. I am curious though, how do the recipients of your emails react to that? And do you work it into the message somehow or perhaps finish with "adult diapers" like a signature at the end of your email?
Dear Spaz,
I have no idea what in the adult diapers you are talking about.
Sincerely,
gowestyoungman