If you wanted to pick a single date to usher in the modern age of the web, you could do a lot worse than pick Thursday, April 1, 2004, the day Gmail launched.
the rumor that google was about to offer a free email service had leaked the day before: here’s john markoff of the new york times reporting on it at the time. But the idea of the search kingpin taking over email was still amazing, and the claimed 1GB storage capacity (500 times that offered by Microsoft’s Hotmail) seemed downright implausible. So when Google issued a press release dated April 1st, many people briefly took it as a really good hoax. (including me)
gmail turned out to be real and revolutionary. and the perspective of a decade only makes it seem more momentous.
Gmail, the first historic service to come out of Google since its search engine debuted in 1998, not only overtook hotmail and yahoo mail, the dominant free webmail services at the time. With its large storage capacity, fast interface, instant search, and other advanced features, it may have been the first major cloud-based application that was able to replace conventional PC software, not just complement it.
Even the things about gmail that bothered some people heralded the advent of the web: its scanning of messages for keywords that could be used for advertising started a conversation about online privacy that continues to this day.
within google, gmail was also considered a huge and unlikely business. it was in the works for almost three years before it reached consumers; during that time, skeptical googlers criticized the concept on multiple grounds, from the technical to the philosophical. it’s not hard to imagine an alternate universe where the effort fell apart along the way, or at least resulted in something much less interesting.
“It was a great time for the Internet,” says Georges Harik, who was responsible for most of Google’s new products when Gmail was created. (The company called those efforts “googlettes” at the time.) “take something that hadn’t been worked on for years but was critical and fix it.”
it all started with the search
gmail is often held up as a shining example of the fruits of google’s 20 percent time, its legendary policy of allowing engineers to divide part of their working hours into personal projects. paul buchheit, the creator of gmail, disabused me of this notion. From the beginning, “it was an official position,” he says. “I was supposed to create an email thing.”
He started working in August 2001, but the service was something of a sequel to a failed effort that dated back several years before he joined Google in 1999, becoming its 23rd employee.
“I started making an email program before, probably in 1996,” he explains. “I had this idea: I wanted to create a web-based email. I worked on it for a couple of weeks and then got bored. one of the lessons I learned was just in terms of my own psychology, that it was important that I always have a product that works. the first thing I do on the first day is create something useful and then keep improving it.”
with gmail, originally codenamed caribou, borrowing the name of a mysterious corporate project occasionally alluded to in dilbert, the first thing buchheit built was a search engine for its own email. and in fact it took only one day to achieve it. his previous project had been google groups, which indexed the internet’s venerable usenet discussion groups: all he had to do was hack groups’ lightning-fast search function to point to his mail instead of usenet.
Initially, buchheit’s email search engine ran on a server on your own desktop. when he sought the opinion of other engineers, his main opinion was that he should also look for his mail. Soon, he did.
The fact that gmail started with a search function that was so much better than anything offered by the major email services profoundly shaped its character. if it had just matched the capacity of hotmail, it wouldn’t have needed an industrial strength search. after all, it’s hard to lose anything when all you have is a couple of megabytes of space.
But serious searching practically begged for serious storage: It opened up the ability to keep all your email, forever, instead of frantically deleting it to stay under your limit. That led to the final decision to give each user 1GB of space, a figure that Google decided on after considering capacities that were generous but not absurd, such as 100MB.
“a lot of people thought it was a really bad idea, both from a product standpoint and from a strategic standpoint.”
Still, long before google decided to give gmail users 1gb of space, it had to decide that gmail would be a commercial product. That wasn’t as obvious as it might seem, even though Google had a manic email-centric culture.
In its early years, one of the things that defined the company was its obsessive focus on its search engine; That set it apart from Yahoo, Excite, Lycos and other search pioneers who had recast themselves as “portals,” expanding their ambitions to encompass everything from weather to sports to gaming and, yes, email. portals had a reputation for doing a lot of things, but not necessarily all that well.
“A lot of people thought it was a really bad idea, both from a product standpoint and from a strategic standpoint,” says Buchheit of his email project. “The concern was that this had nothing to do with web search. some also worried that this would cause other companies, like microsoft, to kill us.”
Fortunately, the doubters did not include the founders of Google. “larry [page] and sergey [brin] always supported me,” says buchheit. “a lot of other people were much less supportive.”
buchheit had been working on his project for a month or two when he was joined by another engineer, sanjeev singh, with whom he had found the social networking startup friendfeed after leaving google in 2006. (friendfeed was acquired by facebook in 2009.) the gmail team grew over time, but not exponentially; even when the service launched in 2004, only a dozen people worked on it.
Gmail’s first product manager, brian rakowski, learned about the service from his boss, marissa mayer, on his first day at google in 2002, fresh out of college. (He’s still at google today, where he currently works on android). what he saw excited him, but it was still an exceptionally rough draft.
“It was nothing like what gmail does now or even what it looked like when it launched,” he says. “I just graduated from school and was indoctrinated in usability testing and target users. I was pretty paranoid that google engineers would love it and it wouldn’t appeal to the mass market. I suffered a lot for that.”
However, all along, the creators of gmail created something to please themselves, thinking that their email problems would eventually be everyone’s problems. “Larry said that normal users would be more like us in 10 years,” says Rakowski.
what is google email like?
Even in August 2003, two years into the effort, gmail had only the most rudimentary front ends. That’s when another new Google recruit, Kevin Fox, was assigned to design the service’s interface. (after leaving google, he met up with buchheit and singh on friendfeed).
fox knew that gmail needed to look like google; the challenge was that it wasn’t entirely clear what that meant. The company did not yet offer a variety of services: Aside from the company’s eponymous search engine, one of the few precedents Fox could draw inspiration from was Google News, which had debuted in September 2002. But both search and news They were websites. gmail was going to be a web application.
“It was a fundamentally different kind of product,” he says. “Fortunately, they gave me a lot of freedom to explore different design directions.” fox aimed for something that would take inspiration from both websites and desktop apps without mindlessly imitating either. after three major design steps, he settled on the look and feel that is still very recognizable in the current version of gmail.
Thinking of gmail as an app rather than a site also had technical implications. Hotmail and Yahoo Mail were originally created in the mid-1990s; they sported dog-slow interfaces written in plain html. almost every action you performed required the service to reload the entire web page, resulting in an experience that didn’t have the quick responsiveness of a windows or mac program.
with gmail, buchheit circumvented the limitations of html by using highly interactive javascript code. that made it feel more like software than a sequence of web pages. before long, the approach would get the nickname of ajax, which stands for asynchronous javascript and xml; today, this is how all web applications are built. but when gmail pioneered the technique, it wasn’t clear if it would work.
The ambitious use of javascript “was another thing that most people thought was a pretty bad idea,” says buchheit. “One of the problems we had was that web browsers weren’t very good back then…we were afraid that browsers would crash and no one would want to use them.”
The more javascript gmail used, the more sophisticated it could become. one of its main features ended up being that the messages in your inbox weren’t strictly sequential. instead, in order to make it easier to follow discussion threads, all messages in a given thread back and forth were collected into a group called a conversation, and any duplicate text was automatically hidden. From a design perspective, Fox says, “trying to make conversations obvious to the user and intuitive was the biggest challenge.”
“We weren’t going to cover it with banners. We committed to that from the beginning.”
then there was the gmail business model. Some within Google argued for it to be a paid service, but Buchheit and others wanted the service to reach as many people as possible, which made an argument for it to be free and supported by advertising. With other free email offerings of the time, that meant flashy display banner ads, the antithesis of the inconspicuous little text ads that, then as now, accompanied Google search results.
“We weren’t going to cover [gmail] with banners,” Rakowski says. “We committed to that very early on.” instead, gmail got little text ads of its own, automatically typed into words in the text of a user’s email. In an example Google used early on to explain the system, two ticket agency ads were shown along with a conversation mentioning a Beach Boys concert.
As with other aspects of gmail, it was not a given that the plan to monetize it through text ads would work. “I remember trying to model how valuable each user would be in terms of advertising,” Rakowski recalls. “We had no idea.”
advertising wasn’t just a math problem. other email services already scan the text of incoming messages, to check for spam and viruses, for example. But doing the same thing for advertising purposes was something new, and Google knew that some people might be scared by any tangible evidence that their messages had been read, even if the one reading it was a machine.
“We thought a lot before we did what we did,” says Harik. “We thought, is this a perceived privacy violation or a real one? we decided it would be a matter of perception.”
going public
for much of its development, gmail had been a skunkworks project, kept secret even from most people inside google. “It wasn’t even guaranteed to cast; we said it had to get to a bar before it was something we wanted to cast,” says Fox.
However, by early 2004, Gmail was working and almost everyone used it to access the company’s internal email system. it was time to set a schedule for a public announcement. the date the company selected was April 1.
That wasn’t just another random day on the calendar. Google had started its tradition of April Fools’ pranks in 2000; the company had a hoax in the works for 2004, involving an announcement that it was hiring for a new research center on the moon. he thought, correctly, that announcing gmail at the same time would lead some people to think the announcement was a joke. especially since 1gb of space was unimaginably huge by 2004 standards.
“Sergey was very excited,” says Rakowski. “The ultimate April Fool’s joke was to release something a little crazy on April 1st and have it still exist on April 2nd.”
“If you’re far enough ahead that people can’t tell if you’re joking, you know you’ve innovated.”
the team had to rush to meet the deadline and, in fact, gmail wasn’t really ready to go: google didn’t have the amazing server capacity to give millions of people reliable email and a gigabyte of space each. . “We had a catch-22 when we pitched,” recalls Buchheit. “We couldn’t get a lot of machines because people thought we couldn’t launch, but we couldn’t launch because we didn’t have machines.”
in the end, gmail ended up running on three hundred old pentium iii computers that no one else at google wanted. that was enough for the limited beta launch the company planned, which involved holding accounts to a thousand external people, allowing them to each invite a couple of friends, and slowly grow from there.
When the news about gmail leaked on March 31st and continued into April Fool’s Day, the reaction actually included a good deal of disbelief. “If you’re far enough ahead that people can’t tell if you’re joking, you know you’ve innovated,” says Harik. “Mostly, journalists would call us and say ‘we need to know if you’re just kidding or if this is real.’ That was fun.”
once it became clear that gmail was the real deal, invitations became an attractive property. The limited implementation was born out of necessity, but “it had a side effect,” Harik says. “everyone wanted it even more. It was hailed as one of the best marketing decisions in the history of technology, but it was a bit unintentional.”
bidding on invitations on ebay sent prices skyrocketing to $150 and up; Sites like Gmail Swap sprung up to match those with invites with those who desperately wanted them. having a hotmail or yahoo mail email address was a bit embarrassing; having one from gmail meant you were part of a club most people couldn’t join.
Despite the unexpected publicity, buchheit sounds a bit wistful about the situation, even a decade later: “I think gmail could have grown a lot more in the first year if we had more resources.”
The aura of exclusivity and experimentation remained with gmail long after it became huge. Google continued to increase the number of invites each user could issue, but didn’t open the service to all comers until Valentine’s Day 2007. And Gmail wore its beta tag like a badge of honor until July 2009 (the company eventually scrapped it as a giveaway to wary business customers, who didn’t want to sign up for something that sounded unfinished.)
Gmail’s use of advertising related to the content of email messages caused annoyance, perhaps more than Google had anticipated. some critics thought it invaded the sender’s privacy; others considered the addressee to be the party whose rights had been violated. fear of inappropriate placement, such as pharmaceutical ads next to a suicide email, was a common theme. and some people had reasonable questions about what google would do with the data it collected to serve the ads and how long it would keep it.
The limited release of gmail, the same thing that made some people compete head-on for invites on ebay, made others develop an antipathy to the service based on assumptions rather than reality. “I went to dinners at friends’ houses,” Rakowski says. “People were talking about gmail not knowing I worked on it, misunderstanding it because they hadn’t had a chance to try it out.”
Reaction from privacy groups turned ugly quickly. On April 6, 31 organizations and advocates co-signed a letter to Page and Brin, raising a multitude of concerns about Gmail, calling it a bad precedent, and calling for the service to be suspended until their concerns could be addressed. “Scanning personal communications in the way Google proposes is letting the proverbial genie out of the bottle,” they warned.
right in google’s backyard, california state senator liz figueroa (d-fremont) sent google a letter of her own, calling gmail a “dating disaster, for you and all your customers “. she went on to write a bill that requires, among other things, that any company that wishes to scan an email message for advertising purposes obtain the consent of the person who sent it. (When the California Senate passed the law, cool heads prevailed, and that obligation had been removed.)
Google reacted to the Gmail ads controversy by listening to critics, detailing its policies on the Gmail site, and highlighting the work of journalists who thought the controversy was silly. he did not yield to those who demanded a fundamental change in the service and rejected what he argued was irresponsible behavior on the part of some of the service’s enemies:
When we started the limited test of gmail, we expected that our service would attract a lot of interest. what we didn’t anticipate was the backlash from some privacy activists, editorialists, and policymakers, many of whom condemned gmail without seeing it for themselves first. we were shocked to discover that some of these activists and organizations refused to even talk to us, or to experience first-hand the very service they were criticizing. As we read news about Gmail, we have regularly noticed factual errors and quotes taken out of context. misinformation about gmail has spread across the web.
shame on google, but why should you care? because it may affect your right to make your own decisions about how you read your mail. This misinformation threatens to eliminate legitimate and useful consumer choices through legislation that targets the innocuous and privacy-conscious aspects of our service, while diverting attention from the real privacy issues inherent in all systems. of email.
“Ten years from now, we’ll probably remember the gmail conflict with… puzzlement,” wrote slate’s paul boutin, one of the journalists whose pro-gmail stances were linked to google in his response to the privacy flap. . For the most part, we do: In 2012, the last time Google issued an official tally, Gmail had 425 million active users, suggesting that discomfort with its advertising approach is a minority opinion. however, the problem has never completely disappeared. it’s still in court, and microsoft continues to tell consumers it’s a reason to use outlook.com, the successor to hotmail.
a decade later
something remarkable about gmail that wasn’t obvious in 2004: its creators built it to last. Today’s incarnations of Outlook.com and Yahoo Mail are nothing like the email services that Microsoft and Yahoo offered 10 years ago. But gmail, despite more or less continuously adding features and going through some significant redesigns, is still gmail.
“I can’t think of another app that has existed this close to its original form for 10 years,” says Fox. “Someone who had only used gmail in its first iteration and suddenly used it today would still understand gmail. they would know how to use it for pretty much anything they wanted to do.”
“What makes the product what it really is comes from the continued focus on the kinds of problems we’re trying to solve for our users,” says alex gawley, current product manager at gmail. “If you look back to 2004, the big problems email users faced were having to delete messages due to lack of storage, not being able to find messages, and unbelievable amounts of spam.” Big opportunities today include making Gmail more action-oriented, which Google is doing with features like live flight status information displayed in messages, and reinventing it for mobile devices like phones and tablets. . Gawley says challenges like these are enough to keep the gmail team busy for the next half decade.
Of course, no matter how ingenious gmail remains, it is now the establishment. When new apps and services like Mailbox and Alto come along, the experience they’re reinventing is one created by Gmail, more than any other email client, over the last decade. The creators of any new service would be happy to do with Google what Google did with Microsoft and Yahoo in 2004.
on the other hand, some of the problems email still has may not lend themselves to the kind of troubleshooting that silicon valley knows how to address. when i sent buchheit a line on his gmail address asking him to chat with him for this story, i got an automated message explaining that he was on an email hiatus, logging, but only sporadically. Did the creator of gmail think email was broken again?
“The problem with email now is that social conventions have gotten really bad,” Buchheit told me once we got in touch. “There is a 24/7 culture, where people expect a response. It doesn’t matter that it’s Saturday at 2 a.m., people think you’re replying to an email. People don’t go on vacation anymore. people have become slaves to email.”
“It is not a technical problem. cannot be solved with a computer algorithm. it is more of a social problem.”
It seems that the man who fixed email in 2004 says that the only people who can fix it in 2014 and beyond are those of us who use it, and sometimes abuse it, every day.
contact us at letters@time.com.