Twenty Years Ago, Google Did The Only Good Tech April Fools Joke: It Launched Gmail For Real
from the the-april-fool's-joke-that-was-real dept
Regular readers of Techdirt will know that we’ve never done any sort of April 1st jokes, even though people often send us ideas for them each year. The simple fact is: nearly all April Fools’ jokes are terrible, especially the silly corporate ones. They’re just bad.
With one exception.
Twenty years ago today, Google announced Gmail. And a ton of people assumed it was an April Fool’s joke. After all, Google’s press release reads… kinda like an April Fool’s joke. And Google has a long history of doing fake product announcements as April Fool’s jokes (and none of them are particularly funny).
People who weren’t online pre-Gmail simply do not realize how different the email world was back then. Web-based email systems had really only become popular in the late 90s (prior to that, most people would download their emails to a separate client using things like POP3). In the late 90s you had the rise of Rocketmail (bought by Yahoo and turned into Yahoo Mail) and then Hotmail (bought by Microsoft and turned into Outlook.com).
But both of those “free” web-based email offerings were slow and clunky and only let you store 10 to 15MB of email data at a time (which is… not very much). And you had to organize the email you did want to store in “folders.”
The real April Fool’s part of Gmail was that it was real. It was so incredibly different from what everyone knew of email. It was as if we had skipped a generation or two of innovation. It had massively more storage. The UI was more responsive (no one remembers how painfully slow it was to do anything in Yahoo Mail). Instead of a confusing set of folders, it used “labels” which allowed you to include multiple labels on a single piece of email. And, of course, it had useful and quick ability to search through old emails (something existing email programs were not at all good at). Oh, and somehow, it finally seemed to get spam filtering (mostly) right.
And even as Gmail has evolved quite a bit since its earliest version, the original still does stand out as quite an achievement:
And, as I pointed out in my Protocols, Not Platforms paper, I still think Gmail is a prime example of the potential of open protocols like those that power email. It rose to a dominant position by out-innovating the competitors, but it still has healthy competition and its dominance doesn’t mean anyone is locked in: it’s not hard to leave if you don’t like what Google is doing with it. If you don’t trust Google, there are plenty of other email service providers out there.
This creates an incentive for Google not to fuck up too much, because it doesn’t have the type of total lock-in that any other messenger service has, which is that when you leave, there’s no longer a way for you to communicate with others who use that system. With email, you can take your addressbook with you and just email them from your new address.
That’s not to say Gmail has been perfect. It clearly has its problems. But in one single not-really-April Fools joke, it completely reset the baseline for email. It’s pretty rare to see that ever happen, and that’s why it remains the one good tech April Fool’s joke.
Filed Under: april fool's, email, gmail
Companies: google
Comments on “Twenty Years Ago, Google Did The Only Good Tech April Fools Joke: It Launched Gmail For Real”
Apple was created a 1st April (1976), and their first computer was sold at 666$.
Maybe companies were funnier in the past, when shareholders were much less greedy…
The big lock-in with GMail (and email in general) is that your address isn’t portable. Changing your email address is a lot of effort telling other people what the new address is and updating web sites and such, the only saving grace is that you can usually set up forwarding from the old address to the new so you don’t have to worry about missing mail until you completely close the old account. But with the domain in your address being theirs you can’t really move it to another service and using your own domain involves paying for business services like Workspace.
I’m not sure what the state of low-cost mail hosting or turnkey personal solutions (SMTP + POP3/IMAP + webmail) is these days.
Re: Spam, or why we can't have nice things
Once I recall trying to set up a mail server. The first piece of advice I encountered was: “don’t”; mainly because of modern day spam filters and the headaches involved. Consider me unadventurous, because I heeded that advice and did not go further.
Still, my very limited understanding is that you can try to self host; you might just find actually using your own email server will be a massive headache. As I recall, some popular spam blocking lists have a tendency of randomly blocking various mail servers, and the appeals process is a Kafkaesque process that makes DMCA seem nice.
This talk was particularly interesting from the perspective of email and spam (and while we’re on the subject, I predict that once open source protocols like bluesky becomes valuable, it’s going to have to deal with spam, just like email).
Email vs Capitalism, or, Why We Can’t Have Nice Things
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrGfahzt-4Q
Re: Re:
The problems are mainly with respect to sending. Setting up a server to receive mail and filter the spam isn’t hard, provided you’ve got some host you can send the mail through (some ISPs still provide this service, and my local “FreeNet”—remember those?—lets authenticated users send mail from arbitrary domains).
Or buy a domain, then pay someone else to host the sending and receiving servers. The costs there are all over the place, from about $10 to $70 per year, plus maybe $20 for the domain. Adjust your IMAP and SMTP settings, or use their webmail, and you should have no trouble. Usually either the domain or the mail provider will host your DNS for free.
Re: Re: Re:
“Or buy a domain, then pay someone else to host the sending and receiving servers.”
I have something like that with GoDaddy.
Back in the late 90’s, ISPs would come and go weekly. Seems like every month, I would update my email with people only have to turn around and do it all over again.
I bought a domain through Godaddy and one of the services is forwarding to any email server. So it doesn’t matter what ISP I change to, my email stays the same
Re:
Individual email addresses are not portable, but email domains are. If you are an owner/administrator for a domain, you get to choose where to host that domain, and you can always change your mind.
Lots of small companies are using GMail to host their corporate email. But there are numerous other hosts out there. And you can create personal/family vanity email domains, and do whatever you want with them.
There was another...
I would argue that Google had one other good April Fool’s creation: In 2014, they created something that eventually evolved into Pokemon Go.
Re: and yet another
I forgot the year, but there was once a google doodle where you would zoom in on google maps and play pac-man with it. IMHO, that was the best April Fool’s gift from Google.
Folders are confusing?
If folders are confusing, I’m not sure gmail or labels are going to be much use to that person.
Also, folders are a constant across email providers, so labels could be looked at as a sort of lock-in by Google.
Re:
The claim wasn’t that folders were confusing, but that the set of folders was confusing. Folders do kind of force people into a hierarchy, and it’s not always obvious what belongs on top; for example, maybe I want to sort my mail by company and by project, and how should I arrange things if multiple companies might be involved in the same project, and each company might use several projects?
What happens to labels when accessing mail over IMAP?
I miss the old gmail layout. It was simple, it was functional and it was fast.
Unfortunately, it now IS a joke
Gmail is now – and has been for the past several years – consistently among the top sources of spam on the entire Internet. Meanwhile, Gmail’s inbound spam filters yield a horribly high false positive rate that nobody with any significant email operational experience would accept on their own systems. The charitable explanation is that it’s just inexperience and ignorance; the more plausible explanation is that Google is deliberately making email as unusable as possible for everyone who doesn’t use Gmail.
Similarly, Google Groups is overrun by spam – to the point where many Usenet news servers have stopped gatewaying traffic from Google Groups. For example, between 10/10/2023 and 2/22/2024, at least 174,148 spam messages from Google Groups were dropped into comp.protocols.time.ntp, the principle newsgroup for discussing NTP. Sadly, that’s not an isolated incident: it’s only part of a far larger pattern, e.g., at least 217,012 spam messages from Google Groups were sent to comp.protocols.dicom between 10/15/2023 and 10/31/2023.
From an operation viewpoint, Gmail has become a disaster for everyone but Google. And of course it’s completely impossible to reach anyone at Google to tell them about this, let alone to persuade them to do their jobs competently and make it stop. Google doesn’t pay attention or respond to the standard contact mechanisms that (nearly) everyone else does, which is not surprising at all given that it’s exactly the same thing they do to their own users: present an impenetrable wall of silence. Which means, for example, that if we discover that a group of spammers has set up shop there, we have no way to tell them about it.
Gmail/Google wasn’t always this way. They used to care. They used to try to not be evil. They used to be responsive and responsible to their peers. But this is how things are now.
Re:
After 20 years and 1.5 billion accounts, it can’t be inexperience. And I’ve forwarded spam from Gmail accounts to Gmail’s postmaster; nobody responded, and that account still sends spam, but ignorance is no longer an excuse.
not very much??
10 megabytes was HUGE in the late 90s. When the average hard drive was still well under a gigabyte.
A 5 minute MP2 song was under 3MB. And a 30 second RealVideo clip was, under 10 megs.
And NO desktop or server email applications accepted anywhere near that size of attachment, if they accepted attachments at all.
I was in on Gmail as an alpha tester. Mail paid for by advertising? Sign me up. Free?!? Wow. And I have to say, I kiss the easy to use plain html interface. When other online email services too minutes to load in their bling, Google let us keep that fast clean html.
They either have, or are, kill(ed/ing) that.
Sizes have gone up. Options have gone up. But I no longer use the web interface for Gmail. I have mail apps on every device that sync easily and stay updated.
As someone who remembers waiting 12 hours for a message to transfer over 300bd…?
I can’t stand how flash and bang and bling the web has gotten. The Gmail site is practically unusable with all the mouse gestures and Ajax and and and crap.
Gmail is currently one of the top mail providers. And a large percentage never see the advertising options as they are not delivered over most apps. Too bad.