Gmail Turns 20 Years Old Today, Celebrates With New Security Rules

Twenty years ago today, Google launched a new product that was initially thought to be an April Fools' Day prank. However, that was quite the opposite, creating Gmail, which would eventually come to have over a billion users with an unfathomable quantity of emails in their accounts. While the history of how Gmail came to be, Google is still going strong and adding features to the platform to support the initial mission that spawned this behemoth.

On April 1st, 2004, Google announced that it was testing a preview release of Gmail, “a free search-based webmail service with a storage capacity of up to eight billion bits of information, the equivalent of 500,000 pages of email. Per user.” This was quite an insane concept at the time, indicated by a complaint from a Google user who noted that they spent “all her time filing messages or trying to find them” while also having to “delete email like crazy to stay under the obligatory four megabyte limit.” A Google engineer saw this complaint and took it on as a personal project, eventually building out a platform designed around three S’s, search, storage, and speed.


Since then, both Google and Gmail have grown immensely, but they have yet to stop innovating and adding features to support the consumer when they have problems. Such is the case with the recent addition of email sender guidelines, which lay out restrictions for people who send more than 5,000 emails a day to Gmail accounts. Starting in February, Google made it so people who fall into this category need to set up authentication for outgoing mail, avoid spam, and make it easy for individuals to unsubscribe from an email subscription. This should make the lives and inboxes of Gmail users significantly better and more secure, too.

Much has changed in the world in the past twenty years, and so have Google and Gmail. What has not changed is Google's apparent commitment to improving users' lives as time goes on. This is no April Fool’s prank, either; it is just a good way to run a business and keep a good product alive.