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@Leo Gmail wasn’t one of the first web mail services, it was actually fairly late to the game. I had been using that Linux based HoTMaiL service (which had been sucked up by Microsoft by 2004, when Gmail was released) for nearly a decade by then.
Google also couldn’t use the “gmail” name in some parts of the world. It never really took off in Germany, for example, at the time, because there was already a commercial “gmail” service provided by another company, so they couldn’t use the name for email services. Originally, Google Gmail addresses in Germany were @googlemail.de and @googlemail.com instead. It was only some time in the early 2010s that they finally got the rights to use the term Gmail in Germany.
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Regarding the .url files, they have been banned on our systems per policy for over a decade. Certainly grateful for the warning though, I went back and double checked that the policy was still active.
Our mail servers reject .doc, .docm, .xls, .xlsm, .ppt, .pptm, .zip, .pif, .url, .7zip, shortcuts and about 2 dozen other types of attachment.
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Gmail certainly wasn’t the first web based email - but it definitely was the first web app most people experienced. It kicked off Web 2.0. The fact it could refresh parts of the screen without refreshing the entire page (using Ajax) was novel and one of the reasons is took off so fast. (That and the “massive” 1GB of storage.)
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These days it’s not uncommon to expect a corporate mail server to reject most file types, especially from external senders.
Also I am absolutely mystified by the idea of a secure network tunnel that doesn’t require ports to be open… and is free!? The “too good to be true” alarm was blaring in my head the whole drive home!
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