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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.'
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.
Sorry, but I don't buy the google altruistic angle - they did this so they could better serve us ads. This is all about information, and who controls it. I doubt highly that it had anything at all to do with improving anyone's way of life. Google is a corporation, it's primary motive is, and always will be, profit.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Quite honestly, if GMail let me drag something into a folder and it would disappear from what is effectively the root, it would become the end-all, be-all of email. Yes - I know I can do stupid shit with tags and whatever ... but at the end of the day, when I fire up email, I don't want the root of the inbox filled with every damn email I have ever received. For whatever reason, perhaps as simple as not wanting whoever is standing over my shoulder when I fire up email see the last 50 emails I got (subject lines, or senders, or whatever) - let me drag that shit out of the root and when I want to see it, I will go to wherever I dragged it. And no, archive isn't the same.
Hotmail sucks ass, and Outlook Express sucks ass, but despite their being the penultimate of ass-sucking when coupled together - they let me keep the inbox fairly clean so a bunch of incriminating emails aren't on display when I fire up my email.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
I think Google's innovations are great, but the Everything's Beta syndrome, in email, in Usenet news archiving, etcetera... It's all wearing a little thin.
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
How much in that article summary is a Gmail ad, and how much is about the history of e-mail?
Hmm, better go RTFA...
Hmm, now wait a minute! It's on Google's blog.
And it still just talks about Gmail.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
MS Outlook is the bane of my email existence. Its inability to group conversation threads encourages replies to include the conversation in its entirety. Its insistence that the reply precede the original drives me batty. I have not used GMail, but that "conversations" thingy looks moderately interesting, if it can display more than a single line of previous messages... Why not an email interface more like IM for conversations? Cut out the redundant headers and signatures. Oh wait, MS Outlook doesn't do the standard "-- \n" signature prefix. Lack of PGP/MIME support just kills me.
Can't remember where I saw this:
Also, I'd like a clearer picture of who sent it, who got it (the Cc: list), and when they sent it. I find this very difficult in MS Outlook which I use at work for various reasons mostly outside my control.
On a slightly different note, there is little I hate more than receiving an email that's been forwarded 700 times and having to scroll through a million >>>>> > >> just to see the message (using mutt for these forwards; perhaps MS Outlook doesn't display all that preceding crud, I don't know).
In conclusion, Outlook has done more to make email a painful experience than Sat^H^H^HAlan Ralsky himself.
E-mail's fine and dandy. However, thanks to spam (or, more specifically, the self-righteous, over-zealous spam blocking lists and filters that have been set up because of the spam) e-mail is not a viable option for delivering critical messages anymore. I still use fax and phone to deliver those.
The owls are not what they seem
Oh, and I've been on the net since 1990 and even back then I couldn't understand why people didn't top post.
The owls are not what they seem
And no, archive isn't the same.
Why not?
The point of archiving is to make the inbox a real inbox - a place where all the email you currently need (e.g. new mail, things you still need to take care of). You should have very little mail in your inbox at any given time (I average at ~6). Everything else should be archived and accesed through labels or search. Try it out, it's great.
Integration of calender and email is extremely usefull. Having a PDA and being able to sync to it makes it even more usefull. gmail does neither and somewhat stands in the way of the later.
Love it or hate it Gmail was a breakthrough for email by generating a renewed interest in improving web based email. Webmail had been basically the same since what, 1996?, then Gmail comes along and turns it on its head. Everyone is a winner as a result. Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google are now all competing and innovating in an area of the web that had been stangnant for years.
And no, archive isn't the same.
Right, it is not the same, but archive + labels are a logical extensions of what folders do. If you apply a label to an email and then archive it, it's the equivalent of moving it to a folder named after the label. Click on the label on the left hand list, and it's the same as clicking on an inbox folder. The only difference might be the hierachical structure folders have, but that can be reproduced by applying multiple labels to the same conversation.
Might not be as friendly as the old file-sytstem-in-my-inbox scheme, but it's definitely more powerful.
Favorite quote: "