What Gmail did to email

When Gmail first appeared in 2004, the idea of having what seemed like a never-ending space for email was revolutionary. Most paid services were providing a few megabytes of space, and here came Google promising a full gigabyte (which, at the time, seemed huge) for free. I switched to Gmail in 2005, not long after it was first introduced (at least, April of that year is the earliest email I can find in my first account), and I — along with a lot of other users — haven’t looked back since. 

For two decades, Gmail has been my main email app, and I have learned to tweak it to my needs. For example, I’ve created rules that automatically place custom labels on the appropriate emails (labels such as Conventions, Books, or, during the first months of the covid-19 pandemic, Masks). I immediately add a star to every message I consider vital and usually remember to check them later. I “snooze” bill reminders so they’ll pop back up a week before they’re due. And I try to keep up with any new features (and got royally pissed at Google for sunsetting its cool Inbox app).

Over the years, however, Gmail has added a plethora of features that it touts as “improvements” but some of which I find irritating. Its autocomplete feature, for example, suggests words or phrases that you can use in emails as you type, which I suppose can be useful but I often find to be a pain in the neck, as the proposed language interrupts my train of thought. Worse, it looks for ads for things that I will never need and sticks 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 that I try out Google’s AI features when I’m perfectly capable of writing my own emails, thank you very much.

Still, last I looked, I had eight Gmail accounts: two personal accounts that I currently use for most of my emails; a business account for The Verge; one account that I use for app testing; three accounts that I created as a freelancer for companies I no longer work for; and one that — well, I forget why I created that one. (And that doesn’t include three that I recently deleted after writing an article about how to find old and forgotten accounts.) 

But as I mentioned, I switched to Gmail in 2005 — which means I’ve been using email since long before that. (I still remember my original CompuServe address from the late 1980s, which was just a series of numbers divided by a comma.) On a shelf in my office, I have several old hard drives, most filled with half-forgotten files and emails waiting to be rediscovered. These emails are not in Gmail. They are not in the cloud at all. The only people who have a copy of them are my correspondents and myself — in other words, actually private one-to-one communication. One day, when I have the time, I can fetch them, read them, and decide whether I want to keep them. And unless I choose, nobody — or nothing — can read them, search them, or scrape them. 

Once upon a time, before the cloud

Back in the dark ages before Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and other free cloud-based apps, most email happened either via paid services or inside of walled gardens. In the former, you paid a service provider for an email account and downloaded your email into an app that only lived on your computer — an app with a name like Pine, Eudora, Pegasus Mail, or Thunderbird. 

For the most part, nobody was scanning your email to find out the last time you bought shoes, or whether you were shopping for car insurance, or that you had recently been buying gifts for a relative’s new baby. Nobody was taking that information and selling it to vendors so they could drop ads into your email lists or surprise you with additional promotional messages. Your email lived on your computer alone. Once it was downloaded and erased from the server, it was just yours — to save or erase or lose. 

But what you did not have was a seemingly unlimited amount of space. In fact, it was a good idea to set your email app to automatically delete the email from the server as soon as it was downloaded to your computer. Why? Because your service provided a specific amount of storage, and if you let the emails pile up, that space allowance would inevitably hit its maximum, which was something you did not want to happen. (Like when I “temporarily” set the server to not delete after download and forget to change it back; after a month, I started getting phone calls from people whose emails to me had bounced.)

Was this a bad thing? Not necessarily. Because if you’re something of a hoarder like I am, this is an excellent way to keep that tendency in check. Not to mention, it encouraged immediate decisions about what was worth saving and what wasn’t, rather than letting it sit in what amounted to a virtual basement, to be reexamined someday.

On the other hand…

There are reasons, of course, why Gmail and other cloud-based email services have done so well, even outside of the increased amount of storage. Ease of access is a major one. Having several years’ worth of emails available to summon at a moment’s notice is really convenient.

For example, inspired by writing this piece, I started going through some of the emails I exchanged with my mother, who died last December, and immediately found one from 2016 in which she asked how a document could be faxed to her using her printer. My answer at the time:

That being said, given the choice, I’d have people email documents rather than fax them. It’s not only a lot easier, but it means we always have a copy in your email that we can search for if the printed-out copy gets mislaid.

Which is how I can currently quickly find emails from friends, family, and colleagues about upcoming meetings, previously taken trips, or that book I promised to lend someone many years ago. (Not to mention that, at the time, it would have taken hours of explanation and frustration to try to talk my mother through the process of using her printer to receive a fax.)

There are other emails from and to her that have more emotional content and which I’m very happy to be able to revisit. (And yes, I also make sure I have backed up my Gmail account, just in case.) If I wanted to search for emails from my father, though, I’d have to start looking through some of those hard drives on my shelf — because he died in 2001, and so any emails we exchanged are there. Somewhere.

So while I may occasionally reminisce about how I handled email before Gmail, I have to admit that looking for my mother’s emails took maybe two minutes; finding the hard drive that has my father’s emails, hooking it up, and doing a search would take a lot longer. In fact, once I’ve found his messages, wouldn’t it make sense to upload them to cloud storage in order to make them more accessible to other family members, even though that will also make them less private? It’s a quandary.

Some of my peers — those who can also remember a time before Gmail — will probably laugh at the idea that, even for a second, I’d want to go back to the way things were. But I can’t help but occasionally glance at that 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 will never see. They are, and will remain, mine alone.