Gmail was the only freemail service with pop+imap support.
In Germany it got rapidly adopted because the competition (web.de and gmx.net, both from 1und1) had less than 10MB space and had a hard limit of 100 mails, no matter their size. And more importantly: no way to download the emails and to archive them.
The most ironic thing was the animation of the storage size on Gmail at the time, because it was growing daily, and they made a counter animation that was increasing storage size (e.g. 1.12345 gigabytes and growing) due to them heavily investing in data centers at the time.
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Gmail was the only freemail service with pop+imap support.
In Germany it got rapidly adopted because the competition (web.de and gmx.net, both from 1und1) had less than 10MB space and had a hard limit of 100 mails, no matter their size. And more importantly: no way to download the emails and to archive them.
The most ironic thing was the animation of the storage size on Gmail at the time, because it was growing daily, and they made a counter animation that was increasing storage size (e.g. 1.12345 gigabytes and growing) due to them heavily investing in data centers at the time.