What started as possibly a joke-“why is the search company making email?”-has become one of the most successful products of all time. RELATED: How to Use Gmail's Advanced Search Features & Create Filters A Very Successful “Prank” To sweeten the deal even more, Google upped the free storage to 2GB on April Fools’ Day 2005-another great “joke.” The free storage space has continued to increase since then, sitting at 15GB of free storage in 2022. Having that much storage-for free, no less-meant people could essentially keep emails forever. Gmail boasted a lot of great features compared to the competition, but the 1GB of free storage was what drove the demand for invites. Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, and other web email services were offering around 2 to 4MB at the time. It may not seem like it nowadays, but that was an incredible feature. There was a very high volume of emails being sent within Google, which made search features a must.Īll of that email volume is what lead to the 1GB of free storage. When Buchheit was first working on Gmail, one of the things Google wanted was robust search capabilities. By this time Gmail was already very popular and hadn’t felt like a “beta” product for some time. It was in beta right from the beginning in 2004 and remained in beta for five years, until July 2009. Gmail’s beta status became sort of a joke. Invites would be required all the way until February 2007. Some people were even selling their invites online. In late April 2004, Google extended invites to active users on its Blogger platform. The 1GB of free storage was a huge selling point. These invites became highly desirable as word of Gmail spread. To kick things off, Google invited 1,000 media members and other prominent figures in technology to try it out and invite their friends and family members. In fact, Gmail ran on three hundred old Pentium III computers at launch. It simply did not have the infrastructure to run Gmail with a large number of users. Google didn’t simply announce Gmail and allow anyone to sign up. RELATED: JavaScript Isn't Java - It's Much Safer and Much More Useful Invites & the Forever Beta Gmail in 2004. People soon realized it was a real product. An email service seemed pretty far out of left field. At the time, Google was only known for search and ads. Naturally, some people thought the announcement was a joke.
Google made it clear that Gmail was in beta, even sticking “Beta” on the logo. Gmail was finally announced to the public on April 1st, 2004. However, by early 2004 most people within the company were using it.
Gmail was kept secret even from people within Google for a while. Every action required the server to reload the page, which was slow. Buchheit worked around that by using JavaScript. The goal was to create a web email service that wasn’t written in plain HTML-like Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. Buchheit’s first version of Gmail was created in one day based on the code from Google Groups.
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