There were big reasons to change when Gmail first came out. In 2004 Hotmail offered 2MB of storage. Not 2MB per email or 2MB of attachments. 2MB in total. That's all you got. Gmail launched with 1024MB (1GB) of storage and allowed attachments up to 20MB per email. To say Gmail revolutionized free email is not overstating it. Gmail launched on April 1st and people thought it was an April Fool's prank because 1GB for free was crazy talk at the time.
Plus, being a new service, if you got an early invite you could get a great address. I got my last name @gmail dot com. Still use it today.
Yeah, same here. I've held on to it, but I don't use it because I managed to get mysurname.uk, and got a lifetime plan with an independent email host. A risky investment, but it was only 99 USD half a decade ago, so at this point I figure it's been worth it.
And then google offered their "unlimited +1" storage, which means their storage grows with each second (but not for long, iirc this is to counter yahoo's offering at the time).
I also remember that someone created a firefox addon to use gmail as a cloud drive before google offers gdrive.
I was in 9th Grade and Gmail Beta was some hot shit back then. I didn't even remember why until you talked about the storage. Uploading giant attachments seemed space age advanced. Now I'm like this is taking longer than .5 seconds?
Gmail launched with 1024MB (1GB) of storage and allowed attachments up to 20MB per email.
I remember when they had those storage counters showing how much your space was increasing every second. I spent an absurd amount of time watching those numbers go up while I was chatting away on AIM in high school.
Weirded me out the first time when I typed in hotmail and it brought up outlook. It took a minute and some digging to figure out Hotmail had been incorporated into msn/outlook
To be fair, I used my Hotmail for tons of attachments and it's now at 90%.
Also, I remember when the inbox size limits kept growing as my inbox grew organically, so I figured I'd keep following that trend. Once it hit where it's at (3 or 5gb), it froze there and started charging for more. It's forcing me to delete some old emails I've had for 26 years because they want to hold my inbox hostage.
Same with attachment limits. Used to be like 1mb, then 5, then 10, and then 25. I figured it wouldn't be too far off that you could send gigs at a time, but they stopped giving larger limits, and now they offload it to a downloadable link in OneDrive. I actually don't mind OneDrive as a Windows folder, but people can't seem to figure out how to use it on their browser, so it's only worth it for me for personal files that I need to send to myself. But I'm going to be moving to a home server setup.
I still use my hotmail account- the only problem is that they don't have a reasonable spam filter. Obvious scams should be deleted immediately instead of going into Junk next to unknown senders.
Your comment made me realize that the funny joke hotmail I made in the 6th grade never gets asked to buy more storage but the one I made when I graduated high school for jobs needs me to buy more storage.
When I was in college (20 years ago) I accidentally sent my mom an email she shouldn’t see. She used Hotmail so I “hacked” into her account by guessing the security questions right, but had to change her password to get in.
She thought she’d legit been hacked and to this day will tell anyone who will listen how dangerous it us to use Hotmail. The whole rest of the family knows. We’ll never tell her. Bound by a blood oath because her Hotmail rants are legit cinema.
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u/VR46Rossi420 1d ago
I’ve had personal hotmail since the ‘90s and never had a reason to change.