[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Blossom

Me too. Remember they gave you 20 invites to share and how high in demand they were? You of course took a few invites to open more accounts so you would have more invites to spread around. I still use my original account and so does hubby. My first though was Hotmail and I still use that account. Wow it's probably 19 or 20 years old.

I got my invite from a chap on a mailing list I'm on who worked at Google at the time and was passing out invites to the list.

There was an amusing bit where another participant on the list was worried because Google could read her mail if she joined. I gritted my teeth and carefully did not ask why any human being at Google could be bothered to read her mail. The offerer simply explained that the things that read her mail were programs scanning for keywords to present hopefully relevant ads.

Gmail fundamentally changed how I worked. I no longer cared about spam. Gmail uses Bayesian filtering to classify mail, but the database of what constitutes spam was assembled from the spam markings of an enormous number of users, and provided the most accurate filtering I'd seen. Perhaps one new spam appeared in my Inbox every two weeks, and Report Spam and I didn't see it again. The odd false positive got flagged, and in a bit of irony, one of the most prominent sources of false positives was a mailing list devoted to another spam filtering product.

Having my mail reside on Google's servers meant I didn't lose mail if I had a hardware failure. And my mailstore became a database, searchable by standard Google search routines. Labels were arbitrary search keys, and filters provided classification. And it also meant my vulnerability to exploits plummeted. Email was the principal delivery vector for viruses, but I read the mail in a browser, and Gmail provided viewers for common attachment types, so none of it ever actually reached my machine. I stopped running a third-party AV product in consequence. It had never found anything save an odd false positive or so, and why bother running it? (Windows Defender is enabled here under Win10 to keep Windows happy, but I don't think I'd miss it if it went away.)

Google has done things that annoy me, like the recent termination of their Google+ service, leaving me stuck with Facebook as the closest social media equivalent. And I wasn't thrilled about the latest redesign of Gmail, though I was able to get it mostly set up as I desired.

But before Gmail, I was reading mail in Outlook, downloaded via POP and stored locally, and discovering the hard way that Outlook behaved very oddly when the local mailstore grew over 2GB. The difference has been night and day.
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Dennis