Email Turns 34

34019 writes "The original Gmail engineer, Paul Buchheit, reminisces on the creation of email, and how he designed Gmail in hopes of it improving the way we communicate. From the article: 'Of course that wasn't the only reason why I wanted to build Gmail. I rely on email, a lot, but it just wasn't working for me. My email was a mess. Important messages were hopelessly buried, and conversations were a jumble; sometimes four different people would all reply to the same message with the same answer because they didn't notice the earlier replies. I couldn't always get to my email because it was stuck on one computer, and web interfaces were unbearably clunky. And I had spam. A lot of it. With Gmail I got the opportunity to change email - to build something that would work for me, not against me.'

Comments

Re:Great! When will it be out of beta?

[Anonymous Coward]

Keyboard shortcuts, nice spell checker, auto completion of address, massive storage, conversation view, etc etc.

You forgot to mention the complete lack of privacy. What the hell is with you Google fanbois? You don't just love having your private e-mails getting data-mined for some obscure corporate purpose, but you are also hell-bent on recruiting more victims to the cause. I shit on you.