Honestly. You really had to go experience the horrors of free web based email before Gmail ever got existed

I would have thought it obvious I did actually experience “free web based email before Gmail ever (…) existed” based upon my comment.

I created my Yahoo account in 1999.

It really wasn’t that bad, and moreover early GMail UIs were absolutely awful. I mean garbage. The UI was cluttered and messy, and Google were trying to enforce a completely different model of email management on everyone that made sense to programmers in an abstract way but not intuitively. I’m a developer, and I didn’t want it.

The only thing I saw that people liked about GMail when it first came out was the large amount of storage. And as I had never hit my Yahoo limit (which was something like 50Mb IIRC, but this was back before everyone was emailing pictures and files to each other), I didn’t see it as a great deal.

I seriously think you all are comparing 1996 Hotmail to 2020 GMail or something, because GMail was just not that big a deal. It definitely wasn’t an improvement in anything but storage over Yahoo Mail.