April 1st… Our brain instantly responds and say its ‘Fools Day’ without even a thought. It’s not only a day to celebrate pranks, but something out of the ordinary thing emerged on this day. Yes! Google’s Gmail is celebrating its Fifteenth Birthday.
Born on April 1, 2004, Gmail has marked a revolution twist to the computer generation. The virtual teenager has connected the world from a simple chat to a smart reply. If we flashback to 14 years back, Email is a lot different than the present day Email; it used to have a lot of spam messages in Inbox, no search options, and storage constraints where a user needs to delete the messages continually.
Now, if you look at the present scenario, Gmail has a profound transformation. We can upload any attachments, spam-control, got a search option to find in the inbox and a lot more.
Smarter Invention to a Smart World
We can store 1GB of data for free and ensured spam filtering capabilities when it was a big issue in mid-2000. It emerged from being desktop-only to work on smartphones, tablets and more. It launched a new feature called tabs, which is a first of its kind to organize messages and sort them accordingly.
Gmail is made more supportive. The Smart Compose, an AI-powered feature is introduced and using it to write a quick email. Google’s Gmail is getting a new update to Smart Compose to include more languages that include- Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese. The option will be made available to the Android and iOS soon.
Here’s 15 birthday bumps to Gmail on successful years
1. Paul Buchheit created Gmail. In 1998, Google gave the introduction about the launch of it but made people wait for Gmail to happen. With the launch of Gmail on 1st April, Google aimed to confuse everyone and think it as a joke but made it happen finally.
2. 2005– Celebrated one-year by increasing the storage limit.
3. 2006– It launched a new chat and calendar feature to Gmail. Google adds 40 languages and began providing a Java-based version of Gmail for mobile phones.
4. 2007– The company rewrote the codes to make it faster and easier for the users. On Feb 14, it opened sign-ups worldwide. It is one of the first email providers to offer free IMAP for all the devices.
5. 2008– Gmail stepped into an Android application. They even provided a video chat feature from the inbox.
6. 2009– It was made available offline.
7. 2010– Introduces Two-step verification.
8. 2011– Google launched Gmail for iOS.
9. 2012– Gmail has 425 million active users and extended storage limit to 10GB. Google drive was introduced for sharing files.
10. 2013– Gmail made an exceptional turn by launching new tabs- Primary, Social, Forums, Promotions, and Updates.
11. 2014– The first application to slam 1 billion installations on Play store.
12. 2015- The interface was enhanced to support in 72 languages.
13. 2016– No surprise it has reached 1 billion active users.
14. 2017– The search engine titan announced machine learning technology where it can identify emails that contain spam and phishing.
15. 2018– This isn’t a joke now, Google has announced the termination of Inbox with more features to it. It has reached 1.4 billion active users.
Trivial fact- Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai thought the launch of Gmail was a joke.
From a regular chat to scheduling messages and searches, Gmail has transfigured lot making billions work secure and viable. Today, Google and its products became the source of everything. It became a solo player and never stepped down in providing all sorts of services and inventions. Google’s story has continued to be successful and will be forever.
