What Gmail did to email

When Gmail first appeared in 2004, the idea of ​​having a seemingly endless space for email was revolutionary. Most paid services provided a few megabytes of storage, and here Google promised a whole gigabyte (which seemed huge at the time) for free. I switched to Gmail in 2005, not long after it was first introduced (at least April of this year is the earliest email I can find in my first account), and I – along with a much another user – haven’t looked back since.

Gmail has been my primary email app for two decades, and I’ve learned to adapt it to my needs. For example, I created rules that automatically add custom labels to corresponding emails (labels like “conventions,” “books,” or, in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, “masks”). I immediately add a star to any message that I think is important and usually remember to check it again later. I hibernate bill reminders so they come back a week before they are due. And I try to keep up with all the new features (and was mad at Google for discontinuing their cool Inbox app).

Over the years, however, Gmail has added a plethora of features that it touts as “improvements,” some of which I find irritating. For example, the autocomplete feature suggests words or phrases that you can use as you type in emails. I suspect this can be useful, but I often find it annoying because the suggested language interrupts my train of thought. Worse, it looks for ads for things I’ll never need and puts them at the top of my email list. (And no, Google, I have no intention of “customizing” my account.) More recently, I could do without the constant suggestions to try out Google’s AI features when I’m perfectly capable of running my own emails. Write emails, thank you very much.

But last time I checked, I had eight Gmail accounts: two personal accounts, which I currently use for most of my email; a business account for The edge; an account I use to test apps; three accounts I created as a freelancer for companies I no longer work for; and one that – well, I forget why I created this. (That doesn’t include three that I recently deleted after writing an article about finding old and forgotten accounts.)

But like I said, I switched I switched to Gmail in 2005 – which means I’ve been using email long before that. (I still remember my original CompuServe address from the late 1980s, which was just a series of numbers separated by a comma.) On a shelf in my office are several old hard drives, most of them filled with half-forgotten files and E emails can be rediscovered. These emails are not in Gmail. They’re not in the cloud at all. The only people who have a copy of it are my correspondents and myself – in other words, actual private one-on-one communication. Someday, when I have time, I can pick them up, read them, and decide if I want to keep them. And unless I choose, no one – or nothing – can read, search, or scratch through them.

Once upon a time, before the cloud

In the dark ages before Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and other free cloud-based apps, most email was sent either through paid services or within walled gardens. In the first case, you paid a service provider for an email account and downloaded your email into an app that only existed on your computer – an app with a name like Pine, Eudora, Pegasus Mail, or Thunderbird.

Most of the time, no one has scanned your email to find out when you last bought shoes, whether you bought car insurance, or whether you recently bought gifts for a relative’s new baby. No one took this information and sold it to vendors so they could insert ads into your email lists or surprise you with additional promotional messages. Your email was on your computer alone. Once downloaded and deleted from the server, it was yours to save, delete or lose.

But what you did not There was seemingly unlimited space. In fact, it was a good idea to set your email app to automatically delete the email from the server once it was downloaded to your computer. Why? Since your service provided a certain amount of storage and you allowed the emails to pile up, that storage space inevitably reached its maximum, which is what you did not want to happen. (For example, if I “temporarily” set the server not to delete after the download and forget to change it back; after a month I started getting calls from people whose emails were bounced back to me. )

Was that a bad thing? Not necessarily. Because if you’re something of a hoarder like me, this is a great way to keep this tendency under control. Not to mention, it encouraged immediate decisions about what was worth saving and what wasn’t, rather than basically leaving it in a basement to be revisited someday.

On the other hand…

There are, of course, reasons why Gmail and other cloud-based email services have performed so well, beyond increased storage. Ease of access is an important aspect. It’s really handy to have years of emails available that can be accessed at any time.

For example, inspired by writing this article, I started going through some of the emails I exchanged with my mother, who passed away last December, and immediately found one from 2016 in which she asked how to get her can fax a document using their printer. My answer at the time:

That being said, if I had the choice, I would rather email people documents than fax them. Not only is this much easier, but it also means we always have a copy in your email to look for in case the printed copy goes missing.

This is how I can quickly find emails from friends, family and colleagues about upcoming meetings, trips I’ve already taken or the book I promised to lend to someone many years ago. (Not to mention, back then, teaching my mother how to receive a fax on her printer would have taken hours of explanation and frustration.)

There are other emails to and from her that have more emotional content that I’m excited to revisit. (And yes, I also make sure I have a backup of my Gmail account just in case.) However, if I wanted to search for emails from my father, I would have to go through some of those hard drives on my shelf – because he died in 2001 and therefore all the emails we exchanged are there. Somewhere.

Although I occasionally remember how I handled email before Gmail, I have to admit that searching for my mother’s email took maybe two minutes; It would take a while to find the hard drive with my dad’s emails, plug it in, and do a search much longer. Once I find his messages, wouldn’t it make sense to upload them to cloud storage to make them more easily accessible to other family members, even if it would make them less private? It’s a dilemma.

Some of my colleagues – those who also remember a time before Gmail – will probably laugh at the idea that I would want to go back to the way things were, even for a second. But I can’t help but occasionally glance at the shelf in my office and wonder what treasures those hard drives hold – treasures that Google, Apple, or any of the other current cloud email providers never see become. They are and remain my sole property.