Everyone’s beloved email service turned 15 years old, and I have so little recollection of the launch of a new email service on April 1, 2004, except in that fledgeling Web 2.0 era, I was very excited about owning a piece of this Google innovation with an unimaginative name ‘Gmail’ (a portmanteau of ‘Google’ and ‘Email’). It also caught my fancy because of the staggering revelation that it offered, to my astonishment, an astounding 1GB inbox space!
Email Wars
Just imagine, in times of the domineering Hotmail and Yahoo defining the email experience in the market — by the way, you ought to have owned at least one email account with either of the two to keep up with the Joneses, the norms of those times provided the free user with a humble 100-200 MB mailbox which was considered good enough in the absence of any big market player, until Google broke the ground with Gmail they would delete the emails to free up space if you can believe me. In fact, so magnificent was the announcement of its 1GB space the tag line literally said, “never delete another email”. Yeah, that set the tongues wagging, the news spread soon, and there was a palpable rush on the Internet forums to get hold of a free invite to the beta version. Once you got an invite and the account subsequently you joined an exclusive club of honchos decisively controlling the distribution of invites to the hoi polloi. If I am not mistaken, you got about 15 free invites to hand out to friends and family. That Gmail ID is today worth its weight in gold and is your access code to the vibrant Google ecosystem.
But that invite-only element to secure a free Gmail account put a dampener on my enthusiasm, to be honest, least of all because, I had to wait until June of 2004 before I got a Gmail ID which really felt like ages when everybody else was trumpeting their prized catch. It was a friend’s generosity on a once lively designer’s forum called SurfUnion, (of which I was a proud co-founder and admin) who got me an invite and I entered the party as well. I also sent him a ‘thank you’ note, that was my first email from the fresh account. Oh, and back in the day, a free Gmail account offered a generous 1GB of space with a humongous attachment option to send. It was just mind-blowing, if you considered that one could only dream of that kind of luxury on a subscription account. Besides the point but Gmail usurped the competition in one swift blow, gaining millions of users within a matter of months after its launch. Amongst other things, it also featured better spam fighting capabilities, a clean user-interface (there were ‘Labels’ like tags and not ‘Folders’!), Gmail Labs to extend its functions (it was awesome), aside from Google’s iconic search engine potentiality to find your emails from the heap quickly. Albeit, all this did not come “free”, as it were since there were targetted ads in the mailbox raising concerns about email privacy shortly. In a series of improvements later Gmail introduced tabs in a bid to improve the email experience and I promptly posted my thoughts in a design case on tha feature.
The Next 15 Years
So that so-called “generous” 1GB space has now become 15GB and shared with Google Drive and the other apps but the Gen Zs have jumped on messaging apps. Email is passé for some nowadays, but Gmail made emailing a quiet and cool revolution for a generation that was struggling with a lack of good email platforms. Picture this, will ya? No matter what, you had no choice but to delete emails as soon as filled up the mailbox, you could not send large attachments or chat with your contacts while in the mailbox. Gmail freed my generation from that tyranny and, in fact, made emailing an informal yet refreshing activity for the pre-Facebook/WhatsApp era. Today, one might check Microsoft Office documents or PDF files without leaving the mailbox on Gmail, no need to own the software anymore.
Gosh! It’s been a magical journey the last 15 years, they just zoomed by, and I am eagerly looking forward to the next 15. Who knows, maybe we could have a Gmail with an invisible UI, with voice capabilities reading text aloud with help from a smart speaker with a human-like expression. Or maybe email would just vanish by 2034 and be replaced by VR so you’re talking to one another from across the globe. Whatever the case, and wherever technology takes us next, fasten your seat-belts for it’s going to be an exciting ride no questions!
