Gmail is one of the free email services that used by many people worldwide. Gmail can be accessed by the users on website or directly from Gmail application installed in the device. Immediately after launch of the services, Gmail has gained many attention from people worldwide. Its eye – catching interface, advanced features and higher storage capacity compare to the other competitors.
Since the storage capacity is considered much – much higher compare to the other competitors can offer. Microsoft’s Hotmail who offered 500 times lesser than Gmail, many people thought that it might be a really good hoax. But it turned out to be a wonderful dream come true.
Therefore, Gmail has become the dominant free webmail services that was able to replace the other major software at that time.
The Initial Story of Gmail
Gmail was created on April 1, 2004 by Paul Buchheit as a limited beta release. Actually, the work on Gmail has been started by Paul Buchheit since August 2001 in Google. Paul Buchheit himself is the 23rd employee in Google. Paul Buchheit started Gmail project from building a search feature for his own email. It received many good feedbacks from the other engineers.
Initially, many people thought that his idea on building Gmail as a free webmail services was a very bad idea from both the strategic standpoint and a product. People thought that webmail services has nothing to do with search engine, the major focus of Google at the time. However, both Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the Google’s founders were very supportive to his idea.
Once the release of Gmail on April 1, 2004, it took for about five years for Gmail to do the testing phase until it finished on July 7, 2009. Until October 2019, Gmail has successfully attracted more than 1.5 billion active users from people worldwide.
The Development of Gmail Features
Initially, the storage capacity offered by Gmail is one gigabyte per user. This storage capacity has increased to 15 gigabytes nowadays. The size of email can be received by the user is up to 50 megabytes. While the size of an email can be sent by user is up to 25 megabytes. If the users want to send larger files, they can choose to attach files from Google Drive.
Because of its sophisticated features and modern interface, little by little the number of active users from Gmail surpassed Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, the two major incumbents at the time. From time to time, Google has worked hard to develop the features and the interfaces of Gmail in order to make it more accessible for its active users.
They have released a totally new interface design for Gmail mobile version with several new features. One of the major new interface designs is the users is able to see the attachments immediately without having to open the email first. There are also some new inbox features such as reminders, scheduled message, pinned messages, Smart Reply, email snoozing and many more.
All of those new features are very useful for the users.