The Technology section is published with the support of Favbet Tech
April 1, 2004 Google revolutionized email by launching the Gmail service .
At the time, Gmail wasn't the only email provider—Hotmail and Yahoo! Post had been around for years, but Google's service offered web access, faster speeds, automatic email organization, integrated search functionality, and 1GB of storage, which was a huge step forward in personal cloud storage at the time.
Google boasted in a press release that the gigabyte of storage was “more than 100 times” larger than competitors' offerings, and announced free access, which at the time was like an April Fool's joke.
Gmail creator Paul Buckheit at his desk at Google in 1999. Photo: TIME
Since then, we know that you can pay for digital services not only with money – in the case of Gmail, users received data as a thank you. The service's software could scan the contents of account holders' emails and use that information to show them personalized ads in the site's sidebar. Good or bad, it was an innovative approach.
For the first five years, Gmail was available in beta by invitation. When the service went public on July 7, 2009, it had more than 100 million users—and a few years later, Google, which improved its spam detection tool to please the public, was reporting 425 million active users. Gmail has officially become the world's largest email service.
In just 20 years of its existence, Gmail has become the main one for a quarter of the world's population – today, according to AndroidPolice, 2 billion people use it. Google recently announced that it will integrate artificial intelligence Gemini into the service, so we wonder what achievements Gmail will boast of for its 30th anniversary.
The Technology section is published with the support of Favbet Tech
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