don’t really even...
don’t really even think about it, but it makes a big difference. You can send
email so fast and you don’t have to remember the addresses. To my knowledge,
we were the first web mail provider to do it. Desktop products would have
things like that sometimes, but no web mail was doing that at the time.
Livingston:Was it always your plan to archive everything and not delete emails
and have the massive storage needs?
Buchheit: You can delete email. The idea was that there’s valuable information
in email and we thought, “Why would you perform these actions?” For deleting,
we found three or four reasons why you might delete things. One is that
you’re running out of space—which was the most common reason for deleting
things, because you only had a 2-megabyte quota. We said, “If we give people
enough storage, then they won’t run into that problem.”
The second reason was that people would delete things just because email
quickly became unmanageable if they didn’t. So we said, “We’ve got search,
we’ll try to make that efficient.” I can handle—I don’t know how many millions
of messages are in my email now—but it’s not a problem. They don’t get in the
way. They’re just there, and if ever I want to find that message from four years
ago where someone made some funny comment about Gmail that is ironic at
this point, then I can go back and find it. I guess the third reason was that
there’s something in the email that the person’s really nervous about and they
just want to get rid of it. But that’s pretty uncommon. So we said, “You want to
provide the ability to delete things, but ordinarily it isn’t really necessary,
because most of the reasons are actually just consequences of limitations elsewhere.”
Livingston: What else were brand new features that the world hadn’t seen?
Buchheit: Conversation view was new—when you click on a conversation and
you get all of the messages as cards instead of separate emails.
Livingston: Was that your idea?
Buchheit: This was a consequence of a few things. One is that I’d worked on
Groups, where we had done some of the same threading. Second was the fact
that we have so much email internally.
We’d have these conversations where someone sends out an email and then
four different people reply to the same thing, and some of them would be like
five hours later and you’d think, “This has been covered five times already and
you keep responding.”
It turned out part of the reason people were organizing their mail so aggressively
is because they were trying to put the conversations back together.
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