20 years of Gmail

boem@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 175 points –
20 years of Gmail
theverge.com
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20 years on, I still prefer folders instead of labels. And I still don't want messages group as "conversations."

It used to be free 1GB of mailbox storage that kept expanding for free. Now there is a hard limit unless you pay.

Did you read the article you referenced?

Or maybe I'm just not seeing the connection.

The cycle is:

  1. Provide a useful service to users at a loss to make the service indispensable
  2. Claw back some of that value for business customers (advertisers) to lock them in
  3. Claw back some of that value for the company

They’re describing how nice step 1 was.

It used to be free 1GB of mailbox storage that kept expanding for free. Now there is a hard limit unless you pay.

I don't think anybody expected that to last forever. That said, the free limit is still way more than enough for most people. I've got 20 years of emails in my account, and I'm just barely past my free limit.

Everything else wrong with Gmail and Google aside, those are the least reasonable complaints? You can use labels as folders. You can also disable conversation grouping, but I doubt you go more than a week before turning it back on.

Yes, a label is just a more versatile folder. If you don’t like that, you can just use a single label per email, but I genuinely can’t see any value in that. But you can if you want.

I less the labeling system sucks, which it does. Also the rules. There’s no innovation and every damn feature of outlook should be basically available and EASY to use in gmail and any other mail client. The shit has been around forever and the lack of advanced options is just astounding. I’m simply disappointed.

What if a message covers 2 different topics?

IMHO the entire OS should be based around files and labels, not files and folders.

On Linux file systems it basically is. A file name is just a label for an inode, and the same inode can have as many file names as you want.

Still this requires different directories for the hardlinks to be in the filesystem, and there's not an easy way given a file to list all "labels" that file has, without checking other directories for files with the same inode.

It used to be free 1GB of mailbox storage that kept expanding for free.

Within a week you could tell there was a set maximum, the speed of increase steadily fell the higher the storage value got. It was a good marketing ploy, but there was never a “forever expanding” promise made.