This month marks 9 years of Gmail. Gmail first launched on April 1st, 2004 in an invite-only beta. Yes it launched on April Fools Day. Gmail was the first webmail to be built on ajax with 1GB of storage which was 20 thousand times more space than other email providers offered. It took a little over a year for Gmail to reach the mobile web, in December of 2005. Gmail got it’s first Android app on October 22, 2008 for the T-Mobile G1/HTC Dream. You can check out a screenshot of that original app down below.
It’s amazing that a project for Google that started with employees spending “20% of their spare time” creating, has now become one of the biggest email services out there. If not the biggest. Of course, Android’s popularity has undoubtedly helped out with Gmail becoming the most popular email service around. It’s still amazing how Gmail was in beta for a little over 5 years. Gmail finally left beta on July 7, 2009 which was before I started using it. I jumped ship to Gmail when I first jumped onto Android with the original Motorola Droid. As of June 28th, 2012 it had 425 million active users. Which is quite a bit of people, I wonder how many overall users Gmail has right now?
On April 24th, 2012, Google upped Gmail’s storage to 10GB. Which is a ton for email storage, I have a few thousand messages in my inbox and use about half a gigabyte of storage. Of course if you’re always sending files back in forth in email you’ll definitely use more storage.
So when did you start using Gmail? Is it your primary email provider? Let us know in the comments down below. Check out the full infographic from Google down below.