On April 1, 2004, Google revolutionized email by launching Gmail.
Gmail wasn’t the only email provider at the time — Hotmail and Yahoo! Post had been around for years – but Google’s service offered web access, faster speeds, automatic email organization, integrated search functions, and 1 GB of storage, which was a huge step forward in personal cloud storage at the time.
In a press release, Google boasted that the gigabyte of storage «was more than 100 times» more than competitors’ offerings and announced free access, which at the time seemed like an April Fools’ Day joke.
Since then, we’ve known that you can pay for digital services with more than just money — in the case of Gmail, users were charged with data as a thank you. The service’s software could scan the content of account holders’ emails and use this information to show them personalized ads in the sidebar of the site. For better or worse, it was an innovative approach.
For the first five years, Gmail was available in beta by invitation. When the service went public on July 7, 2009, it had more than 100 million users — and a few years later, Google, which had improved its spam detection tool to the public’s liking, reported 425 million active users. Gmail officially became the world’s largest email service.
Over the 20 years of its existence, Gmail has become the primary email service for a quarter of the world’s population — today, according to AndroidPolice, 2 billion people use it. Google has announced that it will integrate Gemini artificial intelligence so it’s interesting to see what achievements Gmail will boast of on its 30th anniversary.