This week Google’s Gmail crossed the 7 GB storage threshold – meaning that anyone can get a mailbox with at least that much storage, and for free, too. (The size continues to increase slightly each day, wonder of wonders.) It made me stop and think about how much my email habits have changed in the past ten years, when Marshall Rose and I sat down to write a book about Internet emails. Back then, 7 GB was a lot of room for your mailbox, and I don’t think anyone imagined that we would have it free of charge, either.

Of course, one thing that is very odd is that Gmail has been in beta like, forever it seems. (We are coming up on close to 5 years.) I wonder when Google will consider it good enough for a release candidate? If this had been Microsoft, we would be on v 3.1 or something by now, for sure. One wag suggested that the real product name is “Gmail Beta.” Har har.

Ten years ago, I was using desktop email software to store my messages. If memory serves me, I used a succession of products, including Eudora, Thunderbird, and Lotus Notes. When I had problems with T-bird corrupting my messages about two and a half years ago, I switched to Gmail, and have been a pretty happy camper for the most part. What is interesting is that Google hosts the email for my strom.com domain, again, completely free of charge and with a very capable user interface as well. I don’t need to store my emails on any desktop, because it lives in the cloud.

So ten years ago, we had the following email programs popular enough that we included them in our book: Lotus cc:Mail (extinct), Netscape Messenger (extinct but replaced by Thunderbird you could say), Eudora Pro (still very much alive, although no longer under the thumb of a phone handset maker thankfully), Compuserve (not extinct but should be), AOL (ditto and back then it was on v3), and Microsoft’s Outlook Express (v4 that came with IE v4, and replaced with the Mail app in Vista).

Curiously, CS and cc:Mail were proprietary software that didn’t start out using Internet protocols and standards, and had their basis in local area networks (cc:Mail) and closed online systems (Compuserve). The ones that are still among us are Internet-savvy. Indeed, you could say that AOL had one of the first popular gateways to Internet emails (although MCIMail beat it by several years, it wasn’t very popular). Compuserve was also very popular in its day, despite having email addresses that only a geek could love like 73234,5869. Trying saying that string often to your friends.

Back ten years ago, we didn’t have Web-based emailers that were worth much of anything. They had few features, couldn’t really interoperate with all that many browsers, and had lots of other quirks. Outlook’s Web interface was dog slow and required all sorts of tricks to work across a public Internet connection. We wrote in our book: “Either the market will enforce adult supervision … whereby IMAP technology is … standardized or a huge opportunity will open up for Web-based email readers.” Gmail has tried to play both ends here, with its support of the IMAP protocols as part of its service.

In our book, we introduced the concept of having 100% pure Internet for your email – having products that faithfully implement Internet standards natively if possible. And yes, Notes/Domino, Groupwise, and Exchange are all far from 100% pure, which is why they are in decline.

Back ten years ago, email was still a relatively new concept for corporate communications. You could still find pockets of people who weren’t accessible via a “dot com” email address, and not that many people put their email address on their business card. It was rare to find a corporation that would be diligent about answering their emails from their customers in a timely fashion. Well, some things don’t ever change.

Back then we didn’t have the broadband penetration that we do now, and certainly not the Wifi penetration that we have now. It is perhaps harder to resist the urge to check your email because it is so available. With Blackberries, iPhones, and Internet kiosks everywhere you don’t even need a laptop to stay connected. And the US is even far behind other countries now, sad to say. Ten years ago we still had dial up modems that we used to get connected. I haven’t touched a modem in so long that I can’t remember when, but it was probably around ten years ago when I started tossing them and not carrying them on business trips anymore.

One thing that hasn’t changed much in ten years is secure email usage: almost no one does this, despite some major advances in encryption ease of use. In our book, we called the state of secure email standards “a sucking chest wound” saying that no one has a solution that is multivendor, interoperable, and Internet standards based. That is mostly true today, although there are some solutions that do a better job at hiding the certificate management and automatically decrypt and encrypt message traffic. And several multivendor attempts in the past decade to standardize on approaches have mostly met with failure. Still, despite the many well-publicized breaches, secure email remains out of reach of ordinary humans.

I hope you enjoyed my trip down email memory lane. Certainly, email has become the glue that binds together so much of our communications.

For more 10 years ago perspectives, see Vint Cert’s article in IPJ here.