14 Years Ago When Gmail Began With 1 GB Inbox On April 1, Everyone Thought It Was Just A Joke
The service seemed too good to be true, so much so that people thought it was a hoax.
There are a lot of momentous days in the history of the Internet; when the first web page went online, the first time it launched commercially, the first web browser, the first email server.
Gmail¡¯s launch isn¡¯t one of these firsts, there were plenty of email services available at the time, but it was certainly a launch that changed the face of the Internet forever.
In fact, Gmail was such a great product when it launched that people just couldn¡¯t believe it. It offered them about 250 times more storage space, and was completely free. It just had to be a prank right. Not to mention, it didn¡¯t help that the press release and official launch were scheduled for April 1, 2004.
Was Gmail an April Fool's joke?
You see, most email offerings at the time were horribly clunky affairs. For those of you young enough to have never used anything except Gmail, you don¡¯t know what it was like to be stuck with the likes of Rediff, Yahoo, Hotmail and others. Searching for emails was harder, you had to manually add email contacts into your address book, and all you got was about 4MB of space to store old messages.
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Obviously, most people weren¡¯t too happy about this arrangement. According to Google co-founder Larry Page, it was in fact from a Google Search user that the inspiration for an email service first came. ¡°She kvetched about spending all her time filing messages or trying to find them,¡± Page said in a 2004 press release. ¡°"And when she¡¯s not doing that, she has to delete email like crazy to stay under the obligatory four megabyte limit. So she asked, ¡®Can¡¯t you people fix this?¡¯¡±
The idea that Google could do something way better caught the attention of a Google engineer at the time, named Paul Buchheit, who thought it would be a good side project (Google requires engineers to spend a day a week on projects that interest them, unrelated to their day jobs). Eventually on April , 2004, three years later, Gmail was born.
A 2004 screenshot of the dated Gmail interface, shared by Engineer Kevin Fox
It offered an unbelievably large 1 GB inbox at the time
While it started as a hush-hush project within Google, as it developed, more and more employees began using the tool to access internal emails. There was even a rumour of a slick new email offering from Google, something that The New York Times¡¯ John Markoff wrote about on March 31 that year. And when Google launched the free Gmail the next day, with a whopping 1GB of storage and the power of Google search behind it, obviously people thought it was a hoax.
The first major major offering from Google since its search engine debuted in 1998, Gmail blew competitors out of the water. Today, having a Gmail account is almost mandatory, not to mention it syncs with so many other platforms like YouTube, Google Drive, and Android. And yet, some of Gmail¡¯s drawbacks from 2004 are the kind that still plague us today. Google¡¯s practice of automatically screening emails for keywords to use for advertising purposes kicked off a digital privacy debate that¡¯s still carrying on today.
