Comment by rmunn
8 hours ago
You're absolutely right that Gmail was the best webmail service when it launched, and for some time afterwards. How many people now commenting on HN remember when Gmail launched? Remember how revolutionary it was at the time? Every other email webapp, when you clicked on an email, would refresh the page. Gmail, when you clicked on an email, did not cause a browser navigation. It simply replaced the page contents with the contents of the email.
We're so used to setting webapps do this that we take this for granted, but Gmail was the first email webapp to do this. It's possible it was the first webapp, period, to do this; I feel like Gmail's use of XmlHttpRequest was innovative at the time.
Fast forward twenty years, and what about Gmail is innovative today? Nothing that I can think of. It's mediocre (there are lots of filtering improvements they could make that they aren't making, for example), and everything that made it good has been copied by other webmail clients. There's no particular reason except momentum to stay on Gmail.
Gmail spam filtering also used to be revolutionary and an unsung hero. I haven’t put effort into finding out if other options have caught up with that (because of aforementioned tedium of changing email addressed)
I have had a pobox.com email address (just a forwarding one) longer than I've had a Gmail one, and their spam filtering was pretty amazing too. Even before I set my pobox.com address to forward to Gmail, I never saw very much spam.
Now that Pobox is owned by Fastmail, I rather suspect that Fastmail is going to have the same good spam filtering. Can't speak from experience, though, as I haven't actually used my new Fastmail account yet (it still forwards to Gmail, and so far I haven't switched. Momentum, again).