Life is difficult to imagine without Gmail. It was on this day, April 1, 2004, that Google chose to introduce Gmail. And just like the rest of us don’t believe any big news on the first of April, nobody did in 2004. A CNN report from 2004 says that Google claimed to have a storage limit of 1 Gigabyte. And it did not help that Google had developed a reputation for being a prankster in the tech community. The multi-billion dollar company had once stated that pigeons played the catalyst in its search technology and some other stuff like starting a research center on the moon.
According to USA Today, despite Jonathan Rosenberg (vice president of the products group at Google)’s statement about being serious about the release, speculations were running high about how this was one of Google’s classic jokes. ON Slash.org, which used to call itself a news service for geeks, had a poster that stated that this was going down as one of the biggest pranks ever pulled by anyone in history. Gmail was almost too good to be true. The email service had been advertised flash ads or image banner-free zone. All the ads Gmail had were relevant text messages. The promise of a 1GB free storage was unbelievably large by the normal 2004 standards.