History of Gmail

Posted by Tutorku on November 12th, 2020

Gmail or Google Mail is one of the most popular electronic mail services available today. Here is a brief history of how Gmail was introduced to its end, becoming an email with 1.5 billion active users in October 2020.

Gmail history

Released on April 1, 2004 with beta status, this e-messaging site from Google has many interesting features compared to its competitors at that time.

Their competitors at that time, for example, Microsoft's Hotmail, only provided 2-4 megabytes of free storage services, Gmail was informed that it would provide 1 gigabyte of storage, much more than Hotmail provided.

The storage will be used to attach or send certain files in the electronic mail. Files here can be in the form of images, audio or other files.

Many people and the media at that time couldn't believe it when Google said it would launch a Gmail service, because they released it on April 1. Where many think it's just an April Fools' Day done by Google because of rumors about 1 GB of storage that will be given to each account.

But the fact is that Gmail actually provides 1gb of capacity for each user account, which can be used to send files. The 1 GB capacity provided by Gmail was very large at that time, where users could send attachments up to 25MB per email.

Gmail took the public by surprise again when on its first birthday celebration on April 1, 2005, they doubled the storage from 1gb per account to 2gb per account. This made the public even more shocked because at that time, 1gb alone was considered very large, let alone 2gb.

In 2012, along with the introduction of Google Drive's online storage facility, Gmail again received an update to its storage capacity of 7.5gb to 10gb. At that time Yahoo Mail, a strong competitor from Gmail trying to fight the fame of Gmail, but Gmail is increasingly sped up with the various innovations that he provides.

Until finally in October 2019, Gmail again increased the storage capacity for each account to reach 30gb. Plus the Google Drive cloud storage service which provides 15GB of free storage per account, which means we can still increase storage capacity on Google Drive by purchasing a package provided by Google.