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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.'
How is IRC "officially dead"? I still use it and the servers are usually quite busy. IM and IRC are totally different. I use IM for talking to people I already know, but I use IRC to talk new random people. IRC isn't dead it's function has just changed.
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
I appreciate all he's done for Gmail, but he can't take credit for their excellent spam filtering. That credit should go to Steve Linford and XBL from the Spamhaus project. As stated before, Gmail uses XBL to filter out spam. Needless to say - the XBL is pretty cool.
You had me wondering about that so I did a search of Usenet posts on Google Groups. I see several references to "snail mail" in 1982 but the archive doesn't go back much further.
What's with all the paranoia?
The invite system is a neat way to limit the user pool as they expanded the servers and to prevent spammers from signing up for 100+ accounts (and taking all the human-readable ones). It's their way of trying to make every address tied to a human being; hence the system of signing up with a phone number.
Have you tried using the 'archive' button on the e-mail once you're done reading them? It's the functionality you are asking for.
You know, exploring the interface a bit before bitching about it can be useful. And the archive button is actually quite proeminent.
As I understand it, "Snail Mail" originally dated to the introduction of ZIP codes. Mail without a ZIP code would be de-prioritized and stamped "Snail Mail".
Time to hang my head in shame!! Gmail works fine.
I made a coding error, missing off the trailing "--"s from the closing boundries. ie: The closing boundries should be:
--[BOUNDRY2]--
--[BOUNDRY]--
It is just that the others mail clients are more forgiving of fools and led me into a false sense that my code was OK. Very sorry to have posted. Andy.