![Gmail icon (2020)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/Gmail_icon_%282020%29.svg)
The public history of Gmail dates back to 2004.
Gmail
Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide. A user typically accesses Gmail in a web browser or the official mobile app. Google also supports the use of email clients via the POP and ...
, a
free,
advertising-supported webmail service with support for
Email client
An email client, email reader or, more formally, message user agent (MUA) or mail user agent is a computer program used to access and manage a user's email.
A web application which provides message management, composition, and reception functio ...
s, is a product from
Google
Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...
. Over its history, the
Gmail interface
The Gmail interface makes Gmail unique amongst webmail systems for several reasons. Most evident to users are its search-oriented features and means of managing e-mail in a "conversation view" that is similar to an Internet forum.
An official ...
has become integrated with many other
products and services from the company, with basic integration as part of
Google Account
A Google Account is a user account that is required for access, authentication and authorization to certain online Google services. It is also often used as single sign on for third party services.
Usage
A Google Account is required for Gmail, ...
and specific integration points with services such as
Google+
Google+ (pronounced and sometimes written as Google Plus; sometimes called G+) was a social network owned and operated by Google. The network was launched on June 28, 2011, in an attempt to challenge other social networks, linking other Google p ...
,
Google Calendar
Google Calendar is a time-management and scheduling calendar service developed by Google. It became available in beta release April 13, 2006, and in general release in July 2009, on the web and as mobile apps for the Android and iOS platforms.
...
,
Google Drive
Google Drive is a file storage and synchronization service developed by Google. Launched on April 24, 2012, Google Drive allows users to store files in the cloud (on Google's servers), synchronize files across devices, and share files. In add ...
,
Google Hangouts
Google Hangouts is a discontinued cross-platform instant messaging service developed by Google. It originally was a feature of Google+, becoming a standalone product in 2013, when Google also began integrating features from Google+ Messenger a ...
,
Google Meet,
YouTube
YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second mo ...
, and
Google Buzz
Google Buzz was a social networking, microblogging and messaging tool that was developed by Google which replaced Google Wave and integrated into their web-based email program, Gmail. Users could share links, photos, videos, status messages an ...
. It has also been made available as part of
G Suite
Google Workspace (formerly known as Google Apps and later G Suite) is a collection of cloud computing, productivity and collaboration tools, software and products developed and marketed by Google. It consists of Gmail, Contacts, Calendar, Mee ...
. The ''Official Gmail Blog'' tracks the public history of Gmail from July 2007.
Internal development
Gmail
Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide. A user typically accesses Gmail in a web browser or the official mobile app. Google also supports the use of email clients via the POP and ...
was a project started by Google developer
Paul Buchheit
Paul T. Buchheit is an American computer engineer and entrepreneur who created Gmail. He developed the original prototype of Google AdSense as part of his work on Gmail. He also suggested Google's former company motto ''Don't be evil'' in a 2000 ...
, who had already explored the idea of web-based email in the 1990s, before the launch of
Hotmail
Outlook.com is a webmail service that is part of the Microsoft 365 product family. It offers mail, Calendaring software, calendaring, Address book, contacts, and Task management, tasks services.
Founded in 1996 by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smit ...
, while working on a personal email software project as a college student.
[ (quoting from: ]Jessica Livingston
Jessica Livingston, born 1971, is an American author and a founding partner of the seed stage venture firm Y Combinator.
She also organized Startup School. Previously, she was the VP of marketing at Adams Harkness Financial Group. She has a B. ...
, '' Founders at Work'', ) Buchheit began his work on Gmail in August 2001.
[ At Google, Buchheit had first worked on ]Google Groups
Google Groups is a service from Google that provides discussion groups for people sharing common interests. The Groups service also provides a gateway to Usenet newsgroups via a shared user interface.
Google Groups became operational in Febru ...
and when asked "to build some type of email or personalization product", he created the first version of Gmail in one day, reusing the code from Google Groups.[ The project was known by the code name ''Caribou'', a reference to a '']Dilbert
''Dilbert'' is an American comic strip written and illustrated by Scott Adams, first published on April 16, 1989. It is known for its satirical office humor about a white-collar, micromanaged office with engineer Dilbert as the title charact ...
'' comic strip about Project Caribou.[
At the time when Gmail was being developed, existing email services such as ]Yahoo! Mail
Yahoo! Mail is an email service launched on October 8, 1997, by the American company Yahoo, Inc. The service is free for personal use, with an optional monthly fee for additional features. Business email was previously available with the Yahoo! ...
and Hotmail
Outlook.com is a webmail service that is part of the Microsoft 365 product family. It offers mail, Calendaring software, calendaring, Address book, contacts, and Task management, tasks services.
Founded in 1996 by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smit ...
featured extremely slow interfaces that were written in plain HTML, with almost every action by the user requiring the server to reload the entire webpage. Buchheit attempted to work around the limitations of HTML by using the highly interactive JavaScript
JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...
code, an approach that ultimately came to be called AJAX
Ajax may refer to:
Greek mythology and tragedy
* Ajax the Great, a Greek mythological hero, son of King Telamon and Periboea
* Ajax the Lesser, a Greek mythological hero, son of Oileus, the king of Locris
* ''Ajax'' (play), by the ancient Gree ...
(Asynchronous JavaScript and XML).[
Buchheit recalls that the high volume of internal email at Google created "a very big need for search".][ Advanced search capabilities eventually led to considerations for providing a generous amount of storage space, which in turn opened up the possibility of allowing users to keep their emails forever, rather than having to delete them to stay under a storage limit. After considering alternatives such as 100 MB, the company finally settled upon 1 GB of space, compared to the 2 to 4 MB that was the standard at the time.][
Buchheit had been working on Gmail for about a month when he was joined by another engineer, Sanjeev Singh, with whom he would eventually found the social-networking startup ]FriendFeed
FriendFeed was a real-time feed aggregator that consolidated updates from social media and social networking websites, social bookmarking websites, blogs and microblogging updates, as well as any type of RSS/Atom feed. It was created in 2007 by ...
after leaving Google in 2006. Gmail's first product manager
A product manager (PM) is a professional role that is responsible for the development of products for an organization, known as the practice of product management. Product managers own the product strategy behind a product (physical or digital), ...
, Brian Rakowski, learned about the project on his very first day at Google in 2002, fresh out of college. In August 2003, another new Google recruit, Kevin Fox was assigned the task of designing Gmail's interface. When the service was finally launched in April 2004, about a dozen people were working on the project.[
Initially the software was available only internally as an email system for Google employees.] According to Google, the software had been used internally for "a number of years" before it was released to the public in 2004.[
]
Public release
For much of its development, Gmail had been a skunkworks project
A skunkworks project is a project developed by a relatively small and loosely structured group of people who research and develop a project, often with a very large degree of autonomy, primarily for the sake of radical innovation. The term orig ...
, kept secret even from most people within Google. “It wasn’t even guaranteed to launch–we said that it has to reach a bar before it’s something we want to get out there,” says the Gmail interface designer Kevin Fox. By early 2004, however, almost everybody at Google was using Gmail to access the company's internal email system.[
]Gmail
Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide. A user typically accesses Gmail in a web browser or the official mobile app. Google also supports the use of email clients via the POP and ...
was announced to the public by Google
Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...
on 1 April 2004, after extensive rumors of its existence during testing. Owing to the April Fool's Day
April Fools' Day or All Fools' Day is an annual custom on 1 April consisting of practical jokes and hoaxes. Jokesters often expose their actions by shouting "April Fools!" at the recipient. Mass media can be involved in these pranks, which ma ...
release, the company's press release aroused skepticism in the technology world, especially since Google had been known for making April Fool's jokes, such as PigeonRank. However, they explained that their real joke had been a press release saying that they would take offshoring to the extreme by putting employees in a "Google Copernicus Center" on the Moon
The Moon is Earth's only natural satellite. It is the fifth largest satellite in the Solar System and the largest and most massive relative to its parent planet, with a diameter about one-quarter that of Earth (comparable to the width of ...
. Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's vice-president of products, was quoted by BBC News as saying, "We are very serious about Gmail."
Even when the service was announced to the public, Google did not have the required infrastructure in place to provide millions of users a reliable service with a gigabyte of space apiece. Gmail ran on three hundred old Pentium III
The Pentium III (marketed as Intel Pentium III Processor, informally PIII or P3) brand refers to Intel's 32-bit x86 desktop and mobile CPUs based on the sixth-generation P6 microarchitecture introduced on February 28, 1999. The brand's initial ...
computers nobody else at Google wanted. This was sufficient for the limited beta rollout the company planned, which involved inviting about 1,000 opinion leaders
Opinion leadership is leadership by an active media user who interprets the meaning of media messages or content for lower-end media users. Typically opinion leaders are held in high esteem by those who accept their opinions. Opinion leadership com ...
and then allowing them to invite their friends, and family members to become beta testers, with trials beginning on 21 March 2004; and growing slowly from there.[
]
Extended beta phase
Once it became clear that Gmail was real, and not an April Fools' joke, invitations became highly desired. Although the limited rollout was born of necessity, it created an aura of exclusivity which contributed to its publicity windfall. “Everyone wanted it even more. It was hailed as one of the best marketing decisions in tech history, but it was a little bit unintentional” says Georges Harik, who was responsible for most of Google's new products at the time.[
Active users from the ]Blogger
A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...
community were offered the chance to participate in the beta-testing on 20 April and later, Gmail members occasionally received " invitations" which they could send to anyone. One round of invitations was sent out on 1 May and another three invitations were given to all active members on 1 June. When Gmail increased the supply of invitations, the nascent buying and selling market for Gmail invitations collapsed.
During the early months of the initial beta phase, Gmail's well-publicized feature set and the exclusive nature of the accounts caused the aftermarket price of Gmail invitations to skyrocket. According to PC World
''PC World'' (stylized as PCWorld) is a global computer magazine published monthly by IDG. Since 2013, it has been an online only publication.
It offers advice on various aspects of PCs and related items, the Internet, and other personal tech ...
magazine, Gmail invitations were selling on eBay
eBay Inc. ( ) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995 and became ...
for as much as US$150, with some accounts being sold for several thousand dollars. After a new round of invitations in early June, the price for invitations fell to between US$2–$5. Websites such as Gmail Swap emerged to allow philanthropic Gmail users to donate invitations to people who wanted them.[ On 28 June 2004, Google amended its policy to forbid the selling of registered accounts.]
In January 2005, security experts discovered a critical flaw in the handling of Gmail messages that would allow hackers to easily access private emails from any Gmail user's account. This was posted with detailed information to popular technology site Slashdot
''Slashdot'' (sometimes abbreviated as ''/.'') is a social news website that originally advertised itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters". It features news stories concerning science, technology, and politics that are submitted and eval ...
at 9:23 a.m. PST on 12 January 2005. On 13 January 2005, developers at Gmail announced that they had fixed the problem and that the security flaw had been patched. Despite Gmail's status as a beta application, concerns were raised among some users who were using Gmail as their primary mail account. On 1 April 2005, exactly one year after the initial release, Gmail increased the mailbox size to 2 GB, advertising it as "2 GB plus" and introduced some other new features, including formatted editing which gave users the option of sending messages in HTML or plain text.
On 7 June 2005, The Gmail Invitation Spooler was deactivated by the site owner, following a direct request from the Gmail product manager to shut it down. The service was featured in Popular Science magazine and had given out over 1.2 million Gmail accounts.
, Gmail's canonical
The adjective canonical is applied in many contexts to mean "according to the canon" the standard, rule or primary source that is accepted as authoritative for the body of knowledge or literature in that context. In mathematics, "canonical examp ...
URI changed from ''http://gmail.google.com/gmail/'' to ''http://mail.google.com/mail/''. , those who typed in the former URI were redirected to the latter.
On 2 November 2006, Google began offering a mobile-application based version of Gmail for mobile phones capable of running Java
Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mos ...
applications. In addition, Sprint announced separately that it would make the application available from its Vision and Power Vision homepages, preloaded onto some new Sprint phones. The application gives Gmail its own custom menu system and the site displays attachments, such as photos and documents in the application. The application was solely developed in Google's Kitchener office.
On 28 January 2007, Google Docs & Spreadsheets was integrated with Gmail, providing the capability to open attached Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word is a word processor, word processing software developed by Microsoft. It was first released on October 25, 1983, under the name ''Multi-Tool Word'' for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other pla ...
DOC
DOC, Doc, doc or DoC may refer to:
In film and television
* ''Doc'' (2001 TV series), a 2001–2004 PAX series
* ''Doc'' (1975 TV series), a 1975–1976 CBS sitcom
* "D.O.C." (''Lost''), a television episode
* ''Doc'' (film), a 1971 Wester ...
files directly from Gmail.
On 14 February 2007, invitations were no longer required to create an account and the service was opened for anyone to sign up for.[
On 24 October 2007, Google announced that ]IMAP
In computing, the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is an Internet standard protocol used by email clients to retrieve email messages from a mail server over a TCP/IP connection. IMAP is defined by .
IMAP was designed with the goal of per ...
was available for all accounts, including ''Google Apps for your Domain''.
On 5 June 2008, Google introduced Gmail Labs.
On 8 December 2008, Google added a to-do list
Time management is the process of planning and exercising conscious control of time spent on specific activities, especially to increase effectiveness, efficiency, and productivity. It involves of various demands upon a person relating to work, s ...
to Gmail. When the new Tasks feature is enabled, a box shows up on top of the Gmail window. In it, users can add, reorder and delete tasks. It is also possible to assign a due date to each action and even convert e-mails into tasks.
On 12 December 2008, Gmail added support for PDF viewing within the browser.
On 24 February 2009, Gmail suffered a two and a half hour outage, affecting 100 million accounts.
On 7 July 2009, Gmail officially exited its beta status in a move to attract more business use of the service.
On 1 September 2009, Gmail suffered another outage for several hours.
Trademark disputes
Germany
On 4 July 2005 Google announced that ''Gmail Deutschland'' would be rebranded as ''Google Mail''. The domain became unavailable in Germany
Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...
due to trademark disputes, in which cases users must use the domain . From that point forward, visitors originating from an IP address
An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label such as that is connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication.. Updated by . An IP address serves two main functions: network interface ident ...
determined to be in Germany
Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...
would be forwarded to where they could obtain an email address
An email address identifies an email box to which messages are delivered. While early messaging systems used a variety of formats for addressing, today, email addresses follow a set of specific rules originally standardized by the Internet Engineer ...
containing the new domain.
The domains are interchangeable so users obliged to use the domain are unable to select addresses already chosen by users. Inbound emails sent to either or addresses will reach the user.
The German naming issue is due to a trademark dispute between Google and Daniel Giersch, who owns a German company called "G-mail" which provides the service of printing out email from senders and sending the print-out via postal mail to the intended recipients. On 30 January 2007, the EU's Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market
The European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO; french: links=no, Office de l'Union européenne pour la propriété intellectuelle), founded in 1994, is the European Union Agency responsible for the registration of the European Union trad ...
ruled in favour of Giersch.
Google spoofed "offering" the same service in the Gmail Paper April Fool's Day joke in 2007.
On 13 April 2012, Google received the right to the Gmail trademark in Germany. On that day the domain and the Gmail trademark were transferred to Google.
Poland
In February 2007 Google filed legal action against the owners of , a poet group known in full as ''Grupa Młodych Artystów i Literatów'' abbreviated GMAiL (literally, "Group of Young Artists and Writers"). This lawsuit was lost, but the Web site no longer exists.
Russian Federation
A Russia
Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It is the largest country in the world, with its internationally recognised territory covering , and encompassing one-eig ...
n paid mail redirect service called owns the "Gmail" trademark in the Russian Federation.
The domain name dates from 27 January 2003. The domain name was auctioned.
United Kingdom
On 19 October 2005, Google voluntarily converted the United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the European mainland, continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...
version of Gmail to ''Google Mail'' because of a dispute with the UK company Independent International Investment Research.
Users who registered before the switch to Google Mail were able to keep their Gmail address, although the Gmail logo was replaced with a ''Google Mail'' logo. Users who signed up after the name change receive a address, although a reverse of either in the sent email would still deliver it to the same place.
In September 2009 Google began to change the branding of UK accounts back to Gmail, following the resolution of the trademark dispute.
On 3 May 2010, Google announced that they would start to phase out the domain in the UK. Existing users would get the option to switch to , while new users would be given a address by default. This also required Android phone users to perform a factory reset (requiring a back-up to prevent data loss) to restore phone functionality.
See also
* Gmail
Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide. A user typically accesses Gmail in a web browser or the official mobile app. Google also supports the use of email clients via the POP and ...
* Gmail interface
The Gmail interface makes Gmail unique amongst webmail systems for several reasons. Most evident to users are its search-oriented features and means of managing e-mail in a "conversation view" that is similar to an Internet forum.
An official ...
* History of email
The history of email entails an evolving set of technologies and standards that culminated in the email systems in use today.
Computer-based messaging between users of the same system became possible following the advent of time-sharing in the ear ...
* History of email spam
* History of email marketing
References
External links
Official Gmail Blog
at blogspot.com, with the history of Gmail since July 2007
Official Gmail for Work
{{DEFAULTSORT:History Of Gmail
Gmail
Gmail, History Of
Gmail, History Of