April 1, 2004: Gmail Hits Webmail G-Spot

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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May 9, 2000
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It seems April 1st is a very popular day for company birthdays and seven years ago, (it sure feels like Gmail has been around much longer) Gmail made the scene. The introduction of Google’s Gmail web-based email client changed the structure of web-based email and raised the bar for others to follow.

Some people thought Google was leaving the “beta” tag on the Gmail logo as a joke, a nod to its prankish birthday. “It’s not a joke,” Coleman said in March 2009. He insisted that Gmail would leave the beta phase once the product reached some specific milestones as a business. And indeed, the beta tag was lifted a few months later, in July 2009
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And yet here I am still using my 16-year old AOL e-mail account because I don't give a rats ass about the web interface. I just link it up with Mozilla Thunderbird using IMAP.
 
Gmail invites were a hot ticket back then.

That was before we all knew the devil was actually cashing our souls in one at a time, but we enjoyed the finger of death creeping into our hearts.

*yes, gmail is my main provider, has been for ages, before that, I hosted my own domains, so I just generated new mail accounts as I needed*.

Times, they shore have a changed.
 
Cerulean said:
I got gmail via invite back when it was private beta.
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I did as well, and managed to snag a pretty decent username because of it. How many people can say they have firstname@gmail or simpedictionaryword@gmail?

Well. I came to regret it. Once gmail reached critical mass... spammers were using dictionary words and common names @gmail.com as both a spam to and a reply to address. Nearly guaranteed rate of success because it was now impossible to find available common names and words to user for your account.

In one week, I noticed an uptick in spam in my inbox... Hrm, weird. Took a look, oh... someone's using my email address as their reply-to for spam. Fuck...

The next week... thousands upon thousands of bounce notifications.

Ugh.

That was when it still took a while for gmail to "learn" what was spam and filter accordingly.

I just gave up, set up a forward on my domain and filter directly to a different inbox (label) for that address only... sticking with gmail, because when it comes down to it, it does have the best spam filtering of anything AND you don't have to download it first before it can be filtered if you're using a local client on top of that. (Also an issue before spam filtering was done server side, come to think of it, my current host still doesn't do that.)

Can't believe I've had this addy for almost "only" 7 years now. I can't even remember the last time I regularly used a pop client.
 
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