Five years ago, I finally received my invite to sign up for Google's new email service, Gmail. It was 2004, and I was loyal to Yahoo! Mail at the time for having the relatively cleanest UI and largest storage space (a whopping 6 megabytes) for a free major webmail provider.
There were plenty of gripes I had sent to the Yahoo! Mail feedback teams over the years - everything from the loss of free POP access since April 2002, to the extra step of having a forced home page before the inbox, to the little things like the promo tags appended to every outbound message ("Do you Yahoo!?" or one line ads for various services for Yahoo! or MSN in Hotmail).
Gmail addressed all of those, for free and immediately, and on top of that exhibited a friendly user interface and excellent usability. It seemed that everyone was falling head over heels over the 1 GB of space for a free webmail service, unheard of at the time, which was important too because with Yahoo! Mail at 6 MB and Hotmail at 2 MB, we were bound to be forced into deleting messages instead of keeping online archives. (This is largely why I no longer have my emails from 1998 in Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail.)
Ultimately, it's the little things that count, and Gmail was and remains the most well thought out webmail application out there. To celebrate my half decade as a happy user, here's a list of 30 reasons, one for every other month in the past five years, of what made me enamored with Gmail at its launch and thereafter. (There are more features than just these, but these were and are the ones that hold importance to me and won me over.)
1. threaded conversations
2. snippets previews of messages
3. labels (as opposed to folders, and color-coded) and advanced filters (and archive)
4. sending as custom address for outgoing messages
5. no promo tag lines appended to outbound messages
6. login goes straight to inbox, no home screen
7. no display ads, unobtrusive text ads
8. clickable textarea to reply in that part of the threaded conversation, without page reload
9. auto saving drafts as composing email
10. arrow indicators for which messages are directly to me, and which are mailing lists
11. search operators (is:unread, has:attachment)
12. attachments downloadable as a batch zip file with a folder
13. attachment previews for images and documents
14. single click to download attachment, instead of having to save as from browser
15. attachments upload in background as composing email
16. attachment upload progress bar
17. online viewing of documents via integration with google docs (doc, xls, ppt, pdf)
18. built-in chat (and later with AIM support and group chat)
19. server side chat logs (even when accessing via Jabber with clients or Meebo)
20. free POP access, including sent mail (later free IMAP, seamless with the labels)
21. POP fetching from other mail accounts
22. https
23. history details of IPs and method of access, and ability to sign off other sessions
24. notifications of live updates in threaded conversation while viewing/composing
25. unobtrusive confirmations/warnings as bars at the page top that gracefully disappear
26. mute conversations
27. google gears offline access
28. excellent spam filters (empirically far ahead of other webmail clients)
29. full css-based themes (as opposed to basic color switches), potential user contributions
30. drag-and-drop to move messages
It also had some behavioral side effects. I no longer used custom creative subject headers in replies, since we were maintaing RE: subject headers to keep messages organized in their appropriate threads. And because of their auto-reload of data and that they displayed the actual inbox count in the titlebar of the browser, I developed the habit of keeping my Gmail open, which made me spend far more time in webmail than ever before. This multiplied with built-in chat arrived in 2006 with sounds and flashing notifications. Meanwhile, the labels/filters/archives combined with the ability to send out as a different email address led to me sending and receiving all my Berkeley email through Gmail, and I soon expanded that to all my other email accounts until I had a central Gmail inbox with a vast collection of filters and labels doing all the sorting heavylifting for me. The GB+ of space also meant that I no longer had to delete email letters with large attachments, and could now keep all email online.
As a more or less loyal Yahoo! user from 1997 to 2004ish/2005, I anxiously waited for the invite-based Yahoo! Mail Beta and kept sending improvement requests such as #5, #6, and #9. Most of the requests I made never happened, and my invite arrived over a year after I had told all my contacts I had moved to my Gmail address. In contrast, #12 was one I sent to Gmail's feedback team, and maybe by coincidence, the feature appeared within a week. To give them the benefit of the doubt, they seemed like they were listening to their customers and were prolific with their continuous improvements of their product. It's worth noting that some of these were features at various points of Yahoo! Mail's heyday, such as #16 and the first part of #20. But as long as the Gmail team keeps this up, Gmail will remain the most useful and usable web application I've ever encountered in my online experiences.
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