Gmail launched on April Fools' Day with storage rivals thought impossible
Google unveiled Gmail on 1 April 2004, offering every user a full gigabyte of storage when competitors handed out a sliver of that. The date made some people think it was a prank. It was not, and the service stayed in beta for five years while becoming the world's largest email provider, now with 1.8 billion users.
The storage promise was the headline. On Gmail's first birthday in 2005 the allowance doubled, and product director Georges Harik said Google would keep giving people more space forever. It reached 4 gigabytes in October 2007 after moves by Yahoo and Microsoft, and rose from 7.5 to 10 gigabytes in April 2012 alongside the launch of Google Drive. In May 2013 Google pooled storage across Gmail, Drive and Photos into a shared 15 gigabytes, the free allowance still offered, and since 2018 extra space has been sold through Google One subscriptions.
The interface broke with webmail habits. Designer Kevin Fox wanted users to feel they stayed on one page while things changed around them, and Gmail was notable among web developers as an early adopter of Ajax, the technique that updates a page without reloading it. It put search front and centre and grouped back-and-forth replies into a single conversation, an approach rivals later copied. Labels, which work like tags, replaced rigid folders, and filters could sort, delete or forward incoming mail automatically.
Behind the scenes, Google's servers scan every message for spam, malware and phishing, shunting suspicious mail into a separate folder. Attachments used to be capped at 25 megabytes for both sending and receiving; since March 2017 incoming messages can reach 50 megabytes, and anything bigger travels as a shared Drive file.
The look has evolved too. A minimalist redesign began rolling out in November 2011, and users could switch back until March 2012. In May 2013 the inbox gained automatic tabs sorting mail into categories such as Social and Promotions, which anyone preferring the classic single list can switch off. The beta label finally came off in 2009.
Source: Gmail
