Gmail Celebrates Its Sixth Birthday

Google is very busy with all sorts of April Fools jokes today, from the text-only YouTube to Google Translate for animals. But you can be sure no one is forgetting that today is also Gmail's sixth birthday, arguably Google's biggest product except only its search engine, perhaps. April 1st, 2004 was the date when Google showed the world that it could work its magic for email just as well as it could for search engines. Six years down the line, Gmail is one of the world's largest email services, only surpassed by services from giants like Microsoft and Yahoo, which have been around for far longer than Google's offering.

Back then, the Google founders were still making comments on product launches, something that just doesn't happen any more. "If a Google user has a problem with email, well, so do we," Sergey Brin, Google cofounder, billionaire and, then, president of technology, said when Gmail was initially launched. "Gmail solves all of my communication needs. It's fast and easy and has all the storage I need. And I can use it from anywhere. I love it!," Larry Page, the second half of Google's golden duo, said at the time.

In all fairness, when Gmail launched, it blew all the competition away. In 2004, the state-of-the-art when it came to email storage, from both Yahoo and Microsoft, was 4 MB. It sounds almost unbelievable today, when most people have email attachments bigger than that and some have hundreds of thousands of emails stored, but, just six years ago, 4 MB was considered plenty.

Then, Google came along and offered 250 times more, 1 GB to be precise, something most users didn't even imagine was possible. And the shockwaves didn't take long to spread, Yahoo upgraded its free email service within a month offering its users 100 MB and others soon followed. Today, Gmail users get almost 7.5 GB of free storage space. Yahoo has been offering 'unlimited' space for the past couple of years.

But it wasn't just the amount of storage that made everyone want to get a Gmail account, the service itself had plenty to offer. The sleek design and smart features were a step forward in email productivity and search was, of course, at the center of the experience. The product was an instant hit with the tech-savvy crowd and the hype was amplified by the fact that Gmail was launched in beta and was invitation-only for a long time. In fact, it only shed its beta label last year.

Over the years, a lot of functionality has been bolted on, apart from the normal evolution of the email service. One of the first interesting features was the chat capabilities introduced when Google Talk became an integral part of Gmail. Voice and even video chat followed, making Gmail a full-blown communication system. One of the most recent products to enhance Gmail's functionality, or piggy-back on its success, depending on how you look at it, is Google Buzz, which was integrated into the email service, though not to the delight of all users, to say the least. As for the future, no one can really tell, but one thing seems certain, email, one of the oldest forms of online communication, is here to stay.