Oh, I realize things have grown. And I am in no way saying that I am unhappy with gmail. Just that I can't really remember what drew me to it. Spam filtering isn't something I remember it being much better at. (Well, it was better than other free options, but I had a paid email back then.)
The rest was really just permission to not use folders. Did they even have labels at the outset? I recall there was a big cry over not having hierarchies of data. Maybe it was just labels were simpler... Honestly, I've stopped using labels, even.
I do think it made it apparent that archiving was more than plenty for most people. (And they eventually caved and added deletion.) Anything else you could just search for. Though, again, I don't recall them being that much better at search than other options at the time.
All of that is to say that I don't feel google revolutionized email so much as the just implemented the subset that people actually needed. And made it free for lots of storage so that you no longer had to perform any maintenance. (Seriously, I was paying for email that had a scant 100 megs at the time.)
The rest was really just permission to not use folders. Did they even have labels at the outset? I recall there was a big cry over not having hierarchies of data. Maybe it was just labels were simpler... Honestly, I've stopped using labels, even.
I do think it made it apparent that archiving was more than plenty for most people. (And they eventually caved and added deletion.) Anything else you could just search for. Though, again, I don't recall them being that much better at search than other options at the time.
All of that is to say that I don't feel google revolutionized email so much as the just implemented the subset that people actually needed. And made it free for lots of storage so that you no longer had to perform any maintenance. (Seriously, I was paying for email that had a scant 100 megs at the time.)