Ten years ago, Google was launching Gmail and everyone thought it was a prank

Apr 1, 2014 13:49 GMT  ·  By

Back on April 1, 2004, Google was launching Gmail, a service that has since become one of the world’s major email clients. 

In the beginning, everyone thought it was a joke, just another prank played by Google since the Internet giant didn’t really venture past its search engine business back then. But the service turned out to be as real as any other of its products, and a successful one at that.

Unlike many other email clients out there, Google treated this one as an app rather than a site. In an effort to do something different than its competitors, Google built Gmail in a way that didn’t require to reload the entire web page for every action.

In order to do this, the company had to work around the limitations imposed by HTML by adding in some JavaScript. The idea turned out to be a success, even though many weren’t so sure about this in the beginning.

By using more and more JavaScript for Gmail, the more sophisticated the product became.

When it was launched, Gmail was an invite-only product that only a select few had access to. It grew fast, but at first, getting an account was quite difficult.

The storage was limited to 1GB, so Gmail was only showing the most recent messages, while the interface included just a few basic options, like a rich text editor. Even so, Gmail was giving users about 500 times more space than what Microsoft’s Hotmail was offering.

Nowadays, Gmail is one of the most reliable email clients. Google users have a 15 GB free storage to share between Google Drive, Gmail and Google+ Photos. For the email service, the company takes into account all the messages and attachments in the email, even if they’re in Spam or Trash.

Since security has been a major concern for users over the years, Google provided SSL encryption from the beginning. First, it was just optional, until it eventually became the default setting for everyone.

Back in November, following the NSA scandal, the company upgraded all its SSL certificates to 2048-bit RSA, effectively doubling the protection it offers users.

Two weeks ago, Google announced that, for added security, Gmail encrypted all emails, even as they moved to and from Google Data Centers. This move came as a reaction to the news that the NSA had infiltrated the links connecting the company’s data centers, where data wasn’t protected.