Gmail turns 20: At first everyone thought it was an April Fool’s joke

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Gmail is indispensable for many users today. However, when the service was introduced on April 1, 2004, Google first created a sensation with one of its features. Because Gmail had a groundbreaking one gigabyte of storage!

It sounds ridiculously small today, but at the time it was a revolution. This was 500 times more than the popular Hotmail, which has been around since the mid-90s. Hotmail was later acquired by Microsoft and eventually became Outlook.com.

Big moment for the internet

Back to Google: Since the launch date was April 1, everyone initially thought it was a joke; After all, the Internet giant regularly makes real April Fools’ jokes. However, users soon realized that this was not a joke.

Google has set new standards with Gmail, and not just in terms of storage space. “It was a pretty big moment for the internet,” Georges Harik told Time. At that time, Harik was responsible for many new Google products.

Google engineers worked on this for about three years before Gmail was released. It was announced along with a research center on the Moon; The company’s real April Fool’s joke.

But on April 2, Gmail was still there. However, at that time, Google did not yet have the huge server capacity to provide one gigabyte of storage space to millions of users. “We were in a difficult situation,” Paul Buchheit, one of Google’s developers, explains to “Time”. “We couldn’t get a computer because people thought we couldn’t start, but we couldn’t start because we didn’t have computers.”

Gmail was running on 300 computers

After all, Gmail started with 300 old Pentium III computers that no one at Google wanted anymore. This was enough to begin limited invite-only beta testing. It wasn’t until Valentine’s Day 2007 that the service became available to everyone. Gmail carried the beta label until 2009.

Blick also had an account early on and distributed hundreds of invitations to interested readers.

More than 1.8 billion people worldwide now use this free service. And the storage is now 15 gigabytes. Over the years, Google has introduced a number of innovative features that have shaped the way we use email: packet messages, artificial intelligence tools such as Smart Compose or lightning-fast search functionality have contributed to the popularity of Gmail.

In addition, thanks to Gmail, the “Google Workspaces” service, which is a paid e-mail solution for companies, was created.

Gmail discussions

According to Techreport.com, Gmail now has a market share of almost 30 percent. However, there were also many controversies and problems with the service. There were persistent concerns about data protection and the extent to which third-party developers had access to user data. After all, Google funds the service through advertising.

There were also issues with spam filtering and email security. But Google has continually worked to fix the issues, and according to Google, AI-based defense now filters out more than 99.9 percent of all spam, phishing, and malware emails.

Source :Blick