Gmail revolutionised email in 2004. One GB of storage when Hotmail and Yahoo! had a few MB. Conversation grouping. Search. Labels. Autocomplete addresses. The feel of a desktop app but in a browser. And it had rules, POP/IMAP access and other features regular email services had.
But what really set it apart for me was its spam filtering.
Back in 2004, I used desktop email clients, and even today rarely use webmail. Storage was not an issue. Good desktop clients then had reasonable search, and I used folders with rules instead of labels.
But spam was a big problem. It’s hard to imagine it now, but I often spent 15 minutes or more at the beginning of every day weeding out spam. At the beginning I tried creating rules that blocked email addresses but it was impossible. Spam-filtering via say spamassassin was doable but quite hard. (In retrospect, I should have powered through the complexity and set it up on my laptop – it would have paid off in a few weeks and I would have learnt something new).
Gmail changed everything. It set the bar for spam filtering, and it firmly made that feature table-stakes.
I’m thinking of this because of spam on all the other messaging channels that we use now, and how they all do a much poorer job than Gmail sixteen years ago.
SMS spam is well-known. While Google’s Android now has spam protection built into the messaging app, iOS does a remarkably poor job: not only is there no system level spam protection, you can’t even block what are called ‘short codes’ in India, where the sender is a set of alphanumeric characters instead of a ten digit number.
LinkedIn is too often used shamelessly as a lead-generation mechanism. The sale starts right after you accept an invite and doesn’t end until you report/block or remove the connection. Of course, there is no active spam protection.
Whatsapp has the same problem. You can keep blocking numbers but it’s unpleasant work, the app doesn’t learn, and doesn’t proactively filter for you.
It’s going to be the same for tomorrow’s new hot messaging service. That is because everything we use now is closed and proprietary. There is no way for anyone other than Whatsapp’s own engineering team to develop a spam filter for Whatsapp.
Email is an open system. Gmail could build its own spam filtering engine on top. But an email client like Thunderbird on the desktop or Airmail on the mobile could, if they like, develop their own independent spam filters that work just as well for gmail and other email accounts (note: Thunderbird does, Airmail does not yet). In any case, they are not tied to the email provider you use.
We could have had a different messaging future with XMPP an open messaging standard which was in fact what Google’s old Google Talk chat service used to be based on. You could use any Jabber/XMPP app to plug into Google Talk. I used Pidgin on the Linux system on my laptop. Any of these XMPP client could have implemented a spam filter, even collaborated on spam filtering while remaining independent and competitive.
Open data and standards are a better bit than closed. It’s just not apparent in the moment.