1 April 2004 - Gmail launch

Digital Innovation Days

When Gmail was launched on the 1st of April, 2004, many considered it to be a huge joke by Google. Today, this free email service boasts a user-base of 1.8 billion users worldwide. Written in Java, C++, and JavaScript, Gmail is available in 105 languages. Gmail came with vast storage, a fresh new interface, and instant search, among other existing features. Initially, Gmail was an invite-only service and until 2007, users could sign up only through invites.

From the very start, Google strived to set itself apart from its competition. Apart from enjoying high storage, users were able to search through their inboxes at immensely fast speeds. Attachment sizes were also increased to 25MB. What truly made Gmail stand out was the search feature whose capability was far beyond what was offered by even the major webmail services at the time. This was made possible by a serious increase in the storage space - 1 GB for each user - which allowed users to keep all their emails instead of regularly deleting them to stay under the limit. While this figure may not be groundbreaking by today’s standards, back then Hotmail and Yahoo Mail only provided 2 to 4 megabytes of storage.

The launch of Gmail was a significant moment in tech history for various reasons. Not only was it the first true landmark service from Google since its search engine, but it also completely overshadowed Hotmail and Yahoo Mail - the two most dominant free webmail services of the time. With its array of advanced features, Gmail was the first major cloud-based application that had the potential to replace conventional personal computing software and not just complement it. Thus, what was naively presumed to be a hoax by many before its launch, turned out to be very real and revolutionary.