From its start, Gmail conditioned us to trade privacy for free services
If Gmail proved anything, it was that people would, for the most part, accept any terms of service. Or at least not care enough to read the fine-print closely.
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Gmail wasn't even the first, Hotmail, Yahoo mail, there were tons of free email offerings, even sites that would host your whole website for free like geocities. Gmail came into the market when 3rd party email being free was already well established. They just followed an Apple style of development, taking something that already exists and made a better version of it. Also back then their motto was still "Don't Be Evil" and they mostly still kept to it, so they used that goodwill and the better user experience to grow it at a massive rate. And for the most part, its still the best experience for email for many cases.
The main advantage of Gmail at the time was honestly that they did away with tiny mailbox sizes and attachment limits.
The web UI was also vastly superior to Hotmail or Yahoo
And they blocked way more spam
Little did we know that it was them that was the real spam
The real spam was the friends we made along the way
Ain't that the dang truth! lol
Yes, it was 1GB so you never had to delete anything.
And their slogan was "search dont sort" googles search box was very advanced at the time compared to the free alternatives
I remember the counter too. The ever growing available capacity of my mailbox that was more space than I could ever use. Just open Gmail and watch that number grow