Gmail

Internal development

Gmail was a project started by Google developer Paul, who had already explored the idea of web-based email in the 1990s, before the launch of Hotmail, while working on a personal email software project as a college student.[2] Buchheit began his work on Gmail in August 2001.[3] At Google, Buchheit had first worked on Google Groups and when asked "to build some type of email or personalization product", he created the first version of Gmail in one day, reusing the code from Google Groups.[2] The project was known by the code name Caribou, a reference to a Dilbert comic strip about Project Caribou.

At the time when Gmail was being developed, existing email services such as Yahoo! 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. attempted to work around the limitations of HTML by using the highly interactive JavaScript code, an approach that ultimately came to be called AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML).

recalls that the high volume of internal email at Google created "a very big need for search".[2] Advanced search capabilities eventually led to considerations for providing a generous amount of storage space, which in turn opened up the possibility of allowing users to keep their emails forever, rather than having to delete them to stay under a storage limit. After considering alternatives such as 100 MB, the company finally settled upon 1 GB of space, compared to the 2 to 4 MB that was the standard at the time.[3]

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 Friend Feed after leaving Google in 2006. Gmail's first product manager, Brian , learned about the project on his very 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. When the service was finally launched in April 2004, about a dozen people were working on the project.

Initially the software was available only internally as an email system for Google employees.[4] According to Google, the software had been used internally for "a number of years" before it was released to the public in 2004.

Public release

For much of its development, Gmail had been a skunkworks project, kept secret even from most people within Google. “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. By early 2004, however, almost everybody at Google was using Gmail to access the company's internal email system.

Gmail was announced 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,[5][6] especially since Google had been known for making April Fool's jokes, such as Pigeon Rank. 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.

Even when the service was announced to the public, Google did not have the required infrastructure in place to provide millions of users a reliable service with a gigabyte of space apiece. Gmail ran on three hundred old Pentium III computers nobody else at Google wanted.[3] This was sufficient for the limited beta rollout the company planned, which involved inviting about 1,000 opinion leaders and then allowing them to invite their friends, and family members to become beta testers, with trials beginning on 21 March 2004;[11] and growing slowly from there.

Germany

The former Google Mail logo, in 2005

The Google Mail logo, in 2010

On 4 July 2005 Google announced that Gmail Deutschland would be rebranded as Google Mail. The domain gmail.com became unavailable in Germany due to trademark disputes, in which cases users must use the domain googlemail.com.[30] From that point forward, visitors originating from an IP address determined to be in Germany would be forwarded to googlemail.com where they could obtain an email address containing the new domain.[31]

The domains are interchangeable so users obliged to use the googlemail.com domain are unable to select addresses already chosen by gmail.com users. Inbound emails sent to either googlemail.com or gmail.com addresses will reach the user.

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. On 30 January 2007, the EU's Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market ruled in favour of Giersch.

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

On 13 April 2012, Google received the right to the Gmail trademark in Germany. On that day the gmail.de domain and the Gmail trademark were transferred to Google.

United Kingdom

On 19 October 2005, Google voluntarily converted the United Kingdom version of Gmail to Google Mail because of a dispute with the UK company Independent International Investment Research.[40][41]

Users who registered before the switch to Google Mail were able to keep their Gmail address, although the Gmail logo was replaced with a Google Mail logo. 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.[42]

On 3 May 2010, Google announced that they would start to phase out the googlemail.com domain in the UK. Existing users would get the option to switch to gmail.com, while new users would be given a gmail.com address by default.[43] This also required Android phone users to perform a factory reset (requiring a back-up to prevent data loss) to restore phone functionality.