Looking back on more than two decades of Gmail

Recently I had occasion to revisit some early history with a Google (now Alphabet) property, Gmail. If you are like me, and like many across the planet, you have a Gmail address, perhaps even more than one.

Gmail has been with us since April 1 2004. So not yet 25 years, but two decades and a little more is eons in the tech world. At the time, many wrote off Google’s announcement as another April Fool’s joke. After all, the company had become known for some elaborate April 1 ruses. Does anyone remember TiSP, Toilet internet Service Provider? Google claimed it would send a cable kit to be flushed down the toilet and at a suitable point downstream it would be retrieved as a cable to be plugged in for high-speed internet access back to the home.

Well, Gmail was no ruse. It has essentially become the most dominant email service on Earth. HotMail, Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail, all of which existed before the Google service, have become also-rans, in some cases all but gone.

Does anyone remember when HotMail famously stopped working one day because owner Microsoft had forgotten to pay the $30 domain name renewal fee, resulting in the service going dark. A fellow in Australia decided to pay the fee with his credit card, just so he could read his email!

In any case, Gmail rolled out on that April Fool’s Day in 2004 in a by-invitation-only mode. Those “invites” became highly sought after, even traded or sold on the black market. In my own case, as you can see in the image accompanying this article, my invitation appeared September 1 2004.

Google announced the then unheard of storage limit of 1 gigabyte for its email service. Furthermore, part of the hype surrounding Gmail was that you’d never have to delete an email message ever again, so great was the allocated storage. That claim was quickly dropped.

Until recently I stuck with that claim and in fact didn’t delete a single email. Mind you, the effective space available expanded as Google began to allocate extra space and eventually I signed on for 200 gigabytes of total space across all my Google/Alphabet services, paying a couple of dollars a month for this.

When I posted my initial welcome message from Gmail in a “retro computers” group on Facebook a competition ensued as others posted their start dates. Eventually the earliest I found was one from April 24 2004. I’m certain there are earlier ones out there in the wild still, although many have deleted those early emails.

If you are a Gmail user you may be wondering if there is an easy way to find your earliest email without idly clicking through multiple next pages. Why, yes, there is indeed. All you need to do is hover your mouse over the message count area (in my case there are more than 16,000 messages) at the top right in the desktop web version of Gmail and click on “Oldest”. Presto, there it is, at the bottom of the messages list!

Recently Gmail has begun sporting an “Upgrade” button in the upper right hand corner of the desktop version as Alphabet tries an upsell to drive use of its AI tools, along with additional storage of up to 5 TB. For now this button may only be appearing for users already subscribe to smaller amounts of additional storage under the Google One program.

By the way, here’s what Google has to say about the world’s top handful of email services.

Gmail: Leads the world with 1.8 billion users, offering 15GB of free storage and deep integration with Google apps.

Apple iCloud Mail: Serves about 950 million users through built-in sync across Apple devices like the iPhone and Mac.

Microsoft Outlook: Reached around 400 million users, making it a primary choice for personal and enterprise productivity. (BTW, HotMail has been incorporated into Outlook)

Yahoo Mail: Maintains about 225 million users with classic features and large storage capacity.

Proton Mail: Reached over 100 million users as a top choice for privacy and end-to-end encryption.

Follow me on X (@PeterVogel) or on Bluesky (petervogel.bsky.social).

[email protected]