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

When Google announced the launch of its email service on April 1, 2004, few believed it was “for real,” considering the day the announcement came out was April Fools’ Day. Back then, Google was a small company and few people had heard of it.

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

But then Google announced Gmail and promised a gigabyte of memory, which at the time was many times more than the competition offered. The company also promised that Gmail would be very good at filtering spam at a time when more and more unwanted and unsolicited messages were coming to Yahoo!’s email, which was then the world’s number one.

Because Google had very little memory 20 years ago, and because it was not known whether Gmail would succeed, access was by invitation for the first three years, giving Gmail an air of exclusivity that attracted many users. It was an investment worth making.

Googlers talked about Gmail and the promise of the “three S’s”, namely: “storage, search and speed”. The interface was “cleaner” than other competing programs, and spam management was a hit. In addition, Google has grown significantly, invested in search and created better and better algorithms, so that a few years after the launch of Gmail, you can easily search for messages and in seconds find, for example, a recipe for a cake that your sister sent to you 3-4 years ago ago.

Google launched new services like Maps and Photos and integrated them with Gmail. This was followed by a series of money services launched for companies and then for the general public. Google increased the amount of storage for Gmail several times during its first decade, but it stopped at 15 GB, so many people have to pay for a subscription to have 100 GB, 200 GB or more.

More and more users are having to delete emails frequently to fit into 15GB of storage, and for those who use email a lot, paying a monthly fee is the only solution to getting rid of messages that say their inbox is full.

A subscription for 100 GB of memory (Google Cloud Storage) costs 10 lei per month, and for 2 TB – 50 lei per month.

Google increased the memory for Gmail to 15GB in 2005, which was enough for over 90% of users then, but now it’s not enough, especially since people upload photos taken with their phones to Google Photos, and this is often used by Google Documents. Many users saw that they had nowhere to go and had to pay for a subscription.

Gmail’s integration with other Google services began in 2010, and many changes have taken place. In 2012, Google announced that more than 400 million users use Gmail, and in 2015, that number doubled. 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 terms of users, the two companies that dominated email services for the first 15 years of the WWW’s history.

The latest changes in Gmail concern the integration with Google’s artificial intelligence model, i.e. the former Bard, renamed Gemini. Integration with Gemini promises to help users quickly write longer emails or manage old messages. Some new services are only available to those who pay for a subscription.

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

Sources: AP, CBS News, The Verge

Photo source: Dreamstime.com