20 years of Gmail – The strange birth of an application without which we could not imagine the Internet

It’s been 20 years since Google announced the launch of Gmail, and then many people thought it was a simple hoax. It wasn’t, and now there are 1.8 billion active accounts, the company has launched paid services for years, and Gmail has also received updates to enter the “age” of generative AI.

When Google announced that it would launch an e-mail service on April 1, 2004, very few people believed that it was “for real”, given the day on which the announcement appeared, the day of the Fools. Google was a small company back then and very few people had heard of it.

In 2007 Google even announced a Gmail hoax: a service called “Gmail Paper” where those who requested it were sent their Gmail archive printed on a very special paper!

But Google then announced Gmail and promised a gigabyte of storage, which at the time was many times more than what the competition offered. The company also promised that Gmail would filter spam very well, at a time when more and more unwanted and unsolicited messages were arriving on Yahoo!’s e-mails, which was then number one in the world.

Because Google had very little storage capacity 20 years ago and because it was not known whether Gmail would be a success, access for the first three years was by invitation, and this gave Gmail an air of exclusivity that attracted many users. It was an investment worth making.

Googlers were talking about Gmail and the promise of the “three S’s”, namely: “storage, search and speed”. The interface was “cleaner” than other competing applications and spam management was a success. In addition, Google has grown a lot, invested in search and created better and better algorithms, so that a few years after the launch of Gmail you could easily search through messages and in seconds find, for example, a recipe for a cake that the sister ta sent it to himself 3-4 years ago.

Google launched new services such as Maps and Photos and integrated them with Gmail. Then followed a series of money services, launched for companies and then for the general public. Google increased the storage capacity for Gmail several times in the first decade, but it stopped at 15 GB, so many people have to pay a subscription to have 100 GB, 200 GB or more.

More and more users have to delete emails frequently to fit within the 15GB storage, and for those who use email a lot, paying a monthly fee ends up being the only solution to get rid of the messages that say the “inbox” is full.

The subscription for 100 GB of storage (Google Cloud Storage) costs 10 lei/month, and the one for 2 TB is 50 lei per month.

Google increased the storage for Gmail to 15 GB in 2005, at that time it was enough for more than 90% of users, but now it is not enough, especially since people upload pictures taken with their phone to Google Photos, and it is often used by Google Docs. A lot of users saw that they had nowhere to go and had to pay the subscription.

The integration of Gmail with the other Google services started in 2010 and many changes have come. Google announced in 2012 that more than 400 million users use Gmail, and the number doubled in 2015. In 2017, the threshold of 1.2 billion users was exceeded.

In the summer of 2012, Gmail surpassed Yahoo (launched in 1997) and Hotmail (launched in 1996) in number of users, these two companies being the ones that dominated email services for the first 15 years of the WWW’s history.

The newest changes to Gmail are all about integration with Google’s AI model, i.e. the former Bard, renamed Gemini. Integration with Gemini promises to help users quickly write longer emails or manage older messages. Some of the new services are only accessible to those who pay a subscription.

Gmail is proof that in the age of social media email communication still has its place.

Sources: AP, CBS News, The Verge

Photo source: Dreamstime.com