> it was a revelation of what a web mail client could be
you and I have a different recollection of what Gmail was at the time. Their sole differentiator was unlimited storage. Oh, and they were Google.
Google has relied on their reputation in search to carry most of their products since the early 2000s, right up until Google Plus when things started to fall apart for them and people started to realize that Google is not the invincible Superman they pretended to be. Their "don't be evil" motto was a lie and not everything they touched turned to gold. In fact, it was almost always the opposite of that.
> you and I have a different recollection of what Gmail was at the time. Their sole differentiator was unlimited storage. Oh, and they were Google.
It also introduced, and led to the broad adoption of, a few really nice features: truly effective spam filtering, conversation threading that actually works, and tags instead of folders (e.g. a message can have more than one tag, but it can only be in one folder).
At the time, Gmail offered such a good web-based email client that many people abandoned desktop clients for it.
Gmail's "threading" is probably its worst sin (beating out its weird IMAP interface). When I started using Gmail, my other mail client was mutt, but every other client at the time showed replies to email threads properly as a tree.
As an aside, you could argue that email conversations should look like a DAG (since you could totally quote multiple emails and have multiple In-Reply-To headers, why not) but I'm not aware of any clients that did that.
Gmail went a third way, completely linearizing a thread into a "conversation". This view makes it harder to have discourse over email: if you want to make sure to split a conversation and have both forks get addressed, you have to change the subject line to un-thread replies to your message.
I don't recall it being that much better than the competitors. And even today it seems like a coin toss as to whether an obviously spam email lands in the spam folder or not. Not to mention the seemingly shady backroom deals companies like Sendgrid, SES, etc. are making to ensure their emails get delivered to the inbox. That seems like an area ripe for corruption.
> At the time, Gmail offered such a good web-based email client that many people abandoned desktop clients for it.
Anecdotal, but I very much preferred Thunderbird to Gmail, and was using it up until 2010 or so. Nowadays I use K-9 Mail (Android) where I need to and try to avoid the disaster that is modern email as much as possible.
It also introduced, and led to the broad adoption of, a few really nice features: truly effective spam filtering
Google Mail's spam filtering is many things, but I don't see why it's been particularly effective. Adaptive spam filtering was already being done before GMail came along, and unlike GMail's approach, the filters in other popular email clients didn't lurch so far towards avoiding false negatives that they all but broke normal email by having so many false positives.
you and I have a different recollection of what Gmail was at the time. Their sole differentiator was unlimited storage. Oh, and they were Google.
Google has relied on their reputation in search to carry most of their products since the early 2000s, right up until Google Plus when things started to fall apart for them and people started to realize that Google is not the invincible Superman they pretended to be. Their "don't be evil" motto was a lie and not everything they touched turned to gold. In fact, it was almost always the opposite of that.