History of Gmail

Gmail, a free, advertising-supported webmail service with support for Email clients, is a product from Google.

Mail and Hotmail featured extremely slow interfaces that were written in plain HTML, with almost every action by the user requiring the server to reload the entire webpage.

[4] Buchheit recalls that the high volume of internal email at Google created "a very big need for search".

[4] Buchheit had been working on Gmail for about a month when he was joined by another engineer, Sanjeev Singh, with whom he would eventually found the social-networking startup FriendFeed after leaving Google in 2006.

Gmail's first product manager, Brian Rakowski, learned about the project on his first day at Google in 2002, fresh out of college.

In August 2003, another new Google recruit, Kevin Fox was assigned the task of designing Gmail's interface.

“It wasn’t even guaranteed to launch–we said that it has to reach a bar before it’s something we want to get out there,” says the Gmail interface designer Kevin Fox.

However, they explained that their real joke had been a press release saying that they would take offshoring to the extreme by putting employees in a "Google Copernicus Center" on the Moon.

Although the limited rollout was born of necessity, it created an aura of exclusivity which contributed to its publicity windfall.

It was hailed as one of the best marketing decisions in tech history, but it was a little bit unintentional” says Georges Harik, who was responsible for most of Google's new products at the time.

[4] Active users from the Blogger community were offered the chance to participate in the beta-testing on 20 April and later, Gmail members occasionally received "invitations" which they could send to anyone.

According to PC World magazine, Gmail invitations were selling on eBay for as much as US$150, with some accounts being sold for several thousand dollars.

On 2 November 2006, Google began offering a mobile-application based version of Gmail for mobile phones capable of running Java applications.

[27] On 7 July 2009, Gmail officially exited its beta status in a move to attract more business use of the service.

The German naming issue is due to a trademark dispute between Google and Daniel Giersch, who owns a German company called "G-mail" which provides the service of printing out email from senders and sending the print-out via postal mail to the intended recipients.

[33] Google spoofed "offering" the same service in the Gmail Paper April Fool's Day joke in 2007.

Users who signed up after the name change receive a googlemail.com address, although a reverse of either in the sent email would still deliver it to the same place.

In September 2009, Google began to change the branding of UK accounts back to Gmail, following the resolution of the trademark dispute.