When Gmail first came out in 2004, the idea of having what seemed like an endless space for email was revolutionary. Most paid services provided 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, shortly after it was first introduced (at least April of that year is the first email I can find in my first account), and I, along with a batch from other users, I haven't looked back since.
For two decades, Gmail has been my primary email app, and I've learned to adapt it to my needs. For example, I've created rules that automatically place custom labels on appropriate emails (labels like Conventions, Books, or, during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, Masks). I immediately add a star to each message I consider vital and usually remember to review them later. I “snooze” bill reminders so they reappear a week before they are due. And I try to keep up with new features (and I got really mad at Google for shutting down their cool Inbox app).
However, over the years, Gmail has added a lot of features that it touts as “improvements,” but some of which I find irritating. Its autocomplete feature, for example, suggests words or phrases you can use in emails as you type, which I suppose can be helpful, but I often find it a headache as the proposed language interrupts my train of thought. . Worse yet, it finds ads for things I'll never need and pushes them to the top of my email list. (And no, Google, I have no intention of “personalizing” 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, the last time I looked, I had eight Gmail accounts: two personal accounts that I currently use for most of my emails; a trading account for The edge; an account I use to test applications; three accounts I created as a freelancer for companies I no longer work for; and one that… well, I forgot why I created it. (And that doesn't include three that I recently deleted after writing an article about how to find old, forgotten accounts.)
But as I mentioned, I changed 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 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, private one-to-one communication. One day, when I have time, I will be able to look them up, read them, and decide if I want to keep them. And unless I choose, no one – or anything – can read them, search them, or scrape 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 done through paid services or within walled gardens. In the first, you paid a service provider for an email account and downloaded your email to an app that was only on your computer: an app with a name like Pine, Eudora, Pegasus Mail, or Thunderbird.
For the most part, no one scanned your email to find out the last time you bought shoes, or if you were shopping for car insurance, or if you'd recently been shopping for gifts for a family member's new baby. No one was taking that information and selling it to vendors so they could place ads on your email lists or surprise you with additional promotional messages. His email lived solely on his computer. Once downloaded and deleted from the server, it was yours alone: you could save it, delete it, or lose it.
but what you did No We had a seemingly unlimited amount of space. In fact, it was a good idea to set your email application to automatically delete email from the server as soon as it is downloaded to your computer. Because? Because their service provided a specific amount of storage, and if you let emails pile up, that space allocation would inevitably max out, which it did. No I want it to happen. (Like when I “temporarily” set the server to not be deleted after download and forgot to change it back; after a month, I started getting phone calls from people whose emails had bounced.)
Was this a bad thing? Not necessarily. Because if you're a hoarder like me, this is a great way to keep that tendency in check. Not to mention, it encouraged making 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 re-examined one day.
On the other hand…
Of course, there are reasons why Gmail and other cloud-based email services have done so well, even outside of the increased amount of storage. Ease of access is one of the main ones. Having several years of emails available to consult at any time is really convenient.
For example, inspired while writing this article, 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 me how a document could be faxed to her using your printer. My response at that time:
That said, if I had the choice, I would have people email documents instead of faxing them. Not only is it much easier, but it also means we always have a copy in your email that we can search for if the hard copy goes missing.
This is how I can now quickly find emails from friends, family and colleagues about upcoming meetings, previous trips taken or that book I promised to lend to someone many years ago. (Not to mention, at that point, it would have taken hours of explaining and frustration to try to explain to my mother the process of using her printer to receive a fax.)
There are other emails from and to her that have more emotional content that I am very happy to revisit. (And yes, I also make sure I have backed up my Gmail account, just in case.) However, if I wanted to look for my dad's emails, I'd have to start looking through some of those hard drives on my shelf. – because he died in 2001, so all the emails we exchanged are there. Somewhere.
So while I can occasionally remember how I handled email before Gmail, I have to admit that searching for my mom's emails took me maybe two minutes; Finding the hard drive that has my dad's emails, plugging it in, and doing a search would take a while. batch more extensive. In fact, once you've found your messages, wouldn't it make sense to upload them to cloud storage to make them more accessible to other family members, although that will also make them less private? It's a dilemma.
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 would like 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 contain: treasures that Google, Apple, or any of the other current cloud email providers will never see. They are and will remain mine alone.
