When Google introduced Gmail on April 1, 2004, many people thought it was a joke. Now almost everyone uses this service.
In 2004, email services had limited features and were not very user-friendly. On April 1, Google launched free Gmail, which has become one of the largest email services with over 2.5 billion active users. The Google Play page shows that the mobile version of Gmail has been downloaded more than 10 billion times on Android alone.
Because of the timing of the announcement, people suspected it was a joke. The tone of the announcement contributed to this official announcement— the company clearly underestimated its significance when it described Gmail as a search-based email program that offers a natural extension of Google’s core business of organizing information. However, Gmail soon offered a beta version of the service to a limited number of select users. It remained in this status for more than 5 years after its launch.
Previously, the global email market was dominated by Yahoo!, AOL, and Hotmai, while Ukrainian and Russian services were popular in the domestic market. Google tried to win over users search functions and a fairly large 1 GB of email storage at the time, almost two orders of magnitude more than many other services, which made it possible to no longer delete emails. Users were also interested in the organization of emails into conversations with replies, which made it easier to keep track of them. The author of this news story stopped using email clients for the first time, as it was difficult to do without them.
Even before the official announcement, one of Google’s employees told the New York Times that Gmail would launch on April 1. At the time, Gmail was still unfinished, but the company published a press release at midnight UTC, when April 1 had not yet arrived in the US, to try to «outrun the NYT.
At the time of its launch, Gmail had an invitation-based registration system and a capacity of about 10 thousand users. invitations allowed Google to control the number of users and the system load. When the service was launched in 2004, there were no Gmail accounts. The very first was a test account «Hello World at Gmail» created by Paul Buckheit.
The email storage limit was doubled a year after Gmail was introduced and increased many times over the following years. In 2025, Google is offering 15 GB of free storage to all users. It will take a separate article to list features that Google has added to Gmail over the past two decades.
Source: Neowin
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