Gmail is celebrating its 20th anniversary.

– Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin started the tradition of rolling out outlandish ideas every April Fool’s Day.
– Some of their pranks included posting a job opening for a Copernicus research center on the moon and announcing a “scratch and sniff” feature on their search engine.
– On April Fool’s Day in 2004, they unveiled Gmail, offering 1 gigabyte of storage per account, which was groundbreaking at the time.
– Gmail also included Google’s search technology, threading emails together, and was designed with the three ‘S’s in mind: storage, search, and speed.
– Gmail quickly became popular, now boasting 1.8 billion active accounts.
– Gmail’s success paved the way for other Google products like Google Maps, Google Docs, and the Chrome browser.
– Despite starting with limited capacity, Gmail’s exclusivity led to high demand for invitations to sign up.
– Gmail also raised privacy concerns with its intention to scan emails for targeted advertising.
– Google eventually opened Gmail to all users in 2007 and continued to offer new features like “Gmail Paper” as an April Fool’s joke.



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