Tukukkk

I am too young to have used AOL but I did start with Hotmail.

I believe there was email clients before AOL, available to anyone capable running the software and configuring their servers, but that is not what I'm interested in. I'm curious about the client that popularised it, why was it easy for the average user to get started.

I'm interested in knowing why Hotmail trumped AOL, was it an improvement in user experience like Gmail's use of AJAX? Or was it a well deployed advertising effort?

I'm also curious to learn about how did these companies plan on making money before Google decided that it was enough to leverage on the data users store in their inboxes.

Oh yes. I'm old enough to have witnessed everything. First a dial up account with forum software. No internet as yet, you connected to a bulletin board. A bit later a dial up account without graphics (bloody expensive back then) and Internet. Connecting through Trumpet Winsock. Speed was, if I recall, 14.4 k. When I got my Internet account, one of the first in the country, I had to go to a university for a day to get trained in using it.

My email client back then was Pine. My browser was Lynx. I would go online, look for something quickly - surfing was expensive! - download that page and read it offline. Google wasn't created as yet. Yahoo was barely there.

Hotmail was international, AOL was American - more popular in the USA - and proprietary. Because Hotmail was international it was more popular worldwide.

How did they make money? They simply charged you for it. Yahoo tried a different approach: they allowed free searches with their search engine, but if you wanted a good listing, you had to pay for it.

That's where Google jumped in. Nobody liked the paid search results of Yahoo. First of all, you knew it was paid for. So how reliable was it? Google also had paid links, but far more discrete. A few small ones above the page, and a cheaper version on the right hand side. Good enough to get attention, and far less irritating than the Yahoo ads. That's what killed Yahoo - and very fast. Within a couple of years Yahoo dropped from the number one spot to one of the many.

What is an "email client" in the first place?

The Wikipedia version of History of email indeed glances over the popular aspects.

In Bulletin Board System we had email in almost closed circles, sometimes wider networks and gateways into the real internet mail-system. (Example FidoNet). That started at a fairly popular level during the 1980s. On Amiga, Atari, Mac and PC this was as text-based as it gets, often menu driven. But also the smaller niches were catered for like C64, other "home-computers". But also on the "bigger iron" there were things like mailx (not even menu driven) or elm (released in 1986, and even today perfectly usable 'UI').

But popular means graphical so that the dumbest user can point, click and make a mess of the place called internet.

Enter the Pegasus and Eudora in 1988/9. These programs were real clients with a GUI that popularised email to a really wider audience. Easy to use, nice to look at. If you were "connected".

That makes the difference here since AOL was really popularising "connecting to the net". The popular phrase for this "democratisation" of the internt was Eternal September of 1993. Like other middle men of the time (compuserve, eworld, etc) it offered internal mail-like messaging and a gateway to the real internet. But despite including a "client", it still was a middle man, and as middle men do, it was charging you as well. Making it cumbersome and any user depended on AOL to "get there".

Hotmail was not a "client" but a free service on the "real internet"; offered free of nominal charge ("free" in the sense as "if some offers you something for free on the net, you are the product being sold"). As real and direct connections to the net proliferated, direct access to a POP-mailbox got more convenient than going through the closed ecosystems of these walled garden providers like CompuServe or AOL. Some of these services were client based, but with a service on the WWW-web, even that got superfluous in the eyes of casual users, rquiriung only a measly browser to get stuff mailed.

The advertising frenzy with AOL-discs produced to make landfills overflow in a scale several times bigger than VCS E.T. cartridges might have helped a bit. But the underlying infrastructure of the net available to home-users and adopted in businesses made the change much more attractive. Dial-up only ended when DSL came into numbers, so the change-over took from 1993–2000 in most developed areas.