History of Gmail

Internal development

Gmail was a project started by Google developer Paul Buchheit several years before it was announced to the public. Initially the software was available only internally as an email client for Google employees.
The gmail.com domain name was acquired by Google from Garfield.com, online home of the comic strip Garfield, where it had been used by a free e-mail service.






Gmail began what ended up being a five-year beta phase in March 2004, when Google invited about 1,000 opinion leaders and then allowed them to invite their friends, and family members to become beta testers, with trials beginning on 21 March 2004.
Gmail was made available to the public by Google on 1 April 2004, after extensive rumors of its existence during testing. Owing to the April Fool's Day release, the company's press release aroused skepticism in the technology world, especially since Google had been known to make April Fool's jokes in the past, such as PigeonRank. 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. Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's vice-president of products, was quoted by BBC News as saying, "We are very serious about Gmail."
Active users from the Blogger.com community were offered the chance to participate in the beta-testing on 20 April and later, Gmail members occasionally received "invites" which they could extend to their friends. One round of invitations was sent out on 1 May and another three invitations were given to all active members on 1 June. When Gmail increased the supply of invitations, the buying and selling market for Gmail invites collapsed.

United Kingdom

On 19 October 2005 the UK version of Gmail was converted to Google Mail for reasons similar to those of Germany. With the trademark dispute settled, Google reintroduced the Gmail name in the UK in September 2009 and on 3 May 2010 announced that the googlemail.com domain will be phased out.




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