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Email Turns 34

Posted by Zonk on from the venerable-old-coot dept.

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.'

12 of 196 comments (clear)

  1. ook... by kuzb · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:ook... by ShadeEagle · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Doesn't mean they can't make our lives easier while they're at it.

    2. Re:ook... by MysticOne · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I think the engineers often have the best intentions when it comes to their software ideas. Gmail is no exception. I'm confident the engineers really wanted to change the currently accepted webmail paradigm, and they've done a pretty good job with it.

      The management would be the ones interested in making the money, and they usually pick some fairly unobtrusive ways to do it when it comes to Google. If them showing me small text ads relevent to the e-mails I send means I get 2.5+ GB of storage, searchability, encrypted access, etc., I say more power to them. I understand they have to make money, but at least they're not doing it in the traditional ways.

    3. Re:ook... by Slashdiddly · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You mean in the sense pork industry makes life easier for hogs? I mean - yay, free food!

      I know the humanity is still trying to get out of an age where the struggle for physical survival leaves privacy concerns far behind. But that balance is changing. In 20-30 years, when early idealists within Google are long gone and beancounters have taken over, your data is still there. Near its sunset, Google has the potential of being 100x more evil than Microsoft could ever hope to be.

      Move from desktop apps to web services has many advantages that I won't bother repeating. A lot of those advantages are only possible because of shift of control from end user to the service provider. Like any new technology, this is a double-edged sword.

    4. Re:ook... by tomhudson · · Score: 3, Insightful
      In 20-30 years, when early idealists within Google are long gone and beancounters have taken over, your data is still there. Near its sunset, Google has the potential of being 100x more evil than Microsoft could ever hope to be.

      A lot of those advantages are only possible because of shift of control from end user to the service provider. Like any new technology, this is a double-edged sword.
      A valid point, and maybe a good lobbying point to force ISPs to stop blocking ports 80 and 443 so we can all run our own web servers and store all our data on our home boxes, no matter where we ultimately access it from.
    5. Re:ook... by Damer+Face · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Three reasons to work hard at what you do:

      (i) because you enjoy it;
      (ii) to earn money and buy pretty things;
      (iii) to produce something of quality that other people will appreciate.

      I don't see that any of these are mutually exclusive; I don't see that number three has anything to do with altruism, and I don't see how anyone sensible would claim that it does.

      I think most of us who like gmail think that the engineers who designed did so with all three criteria in mind. Unlike some other software projects.

    6. Re:ook... by Slashdiddly · · Score: 3, Insightful

      While the practice of blocking ports is evil and customers should avoid any ISP that engages in it, I don't think personal web servers is a solution. Just like you cannot expect majority of car owners to be their own mechanics (which was the norm early on, btw), you cannot expect moms and pops maintaining private web services. Even if it was easy to do (like plugging in a tivo-like appliance that does webmail), you give up a number of advantages that only an operation benefiting from economies of scale has.

      I think there may be some parallels to history of farming and food production. In the olden days, most people grew/raised their own food. It was difficult and expensive process but it gave you complete control over quality of the food you ate. New technology allowed more centralized production of food and most people gave that control up for convenience and lower cost. While it is arguable whether they also gave up the quality, there is at least a standard of quality that is being enforced through governmental regulation (FDA in the US).

      I think we will see an equivalent of that in the services industry - a regulation body setting and enforcing privacy laws. And before somebody says that we already have those, no, we do not, at least nowhere near the scope and form that they are going to be. All we have now is businesses essentially self-policing each other with empty promises ("privacy policies"). Most security issues are swept under the rug.

  2. Re:Gmail is to email as... by Glonoinha · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

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    Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
  3. Strange take on history by Jugalator · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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!
  4. E-mail's not good for critical messages by October_30th · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:E-mail's not good for critical messages by The+Cisco+Kid · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Email was never a viable option for guaranteed delivery of messages. Its fast, convenient, easily archivable, and has many other fantastic uses and benefits, but guaranteed delivery of critical messages has *never* been one of them.

      And spamming leeches as well as the negligence of certain software makers is directly the cause of the need for admins of servers to restrict the flood. If it *wasnt* for the blacklists email would already be dead - there would be ten thousand spams for every desirable message, and that would just be in mailboxes of the casual/occasional users - regular users would get far more.

  5. Re:Gmail is to email as... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.