Google launched Gmail with a then-staggering 1 GB of storage
On this day · 1 April 2004
Gmail arrived on April 1, 2004 with a gigabyte free — so generous that many assumed the whole thing was a prank.
On April 1, 2004, Google announced Gmail, a free webmail service offering one gigabyte of storage per user. At the time that figure bordered on the absurd: roughly 500 times what prevailing inboxes such as Hotmail handed out, where users routinely battled near-full mailboxes measured in megabytes.
The timing did Google no favors. A storage claim that outlandish, stamped with an April Fools’ dateline from a company known for elaborate yearly hoaxes, led plenty of observers to dismiss the news as a joke.
Many people brushed it off as an April Fool’s Day prank — until the invitations started arriving.
It was no prank. Gmail also paired its capacity with fast search and a conversation view that grouped replies into threads. Rolled out by invitation only, those early invites quickly became prized commodities — and the gigabyte that once seemed unbelievable soon looked merely ordinary.
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