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[[File:Gmail_logo.png|right|thumb|200px|Gmail by Google logo.]]
The public '''history of Gmail''' dates back to 2004. [[Gmail]], a [[gratis|free]], [[ad serving|advertising-supported]] [[webmail]] [[web service|service]] with support for [[Email client]]s, is a product from [[Google]]. Over its history, the [[Gmail interface]] has become integrated with various other [[List of Google products|products and services]] from the company, with basic integration as part of [[Google Account]] and specific integration points with services such as [[Google Calendar]], [[Google Talk]], and [[Google Buzz]]. It has also been made available as part of [[Google Apps]].<!-- these points of integration need to be documented with references throughout the article -->


== Internal development ==
[[Gmail]] was a project started by Google developer [[Paul Buchheit]] several{{specify|date=March 2011}} years before it was announced to the public. Initially the software was available only internally as an email client for Google employees.<ref>
{{cite web
|url= http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3334241
|title= Google Launches Gmail, Free Email Service
|publisher= SearchEngineWatch.com
|accessdate= 2008-03-12
|last= Sullivan |first= Danny
}}
</ref> The project was known by the [[Code name#Project code name|code name]] ''Caribou'',{{cn|date=March 2011}} a reference to a [[Dilbert]] comic strip about Project Caribou.

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.<ref>{{cite web | url=http://www.intelliot.com/blog/archives/2004/03/31/slashdot-comments-on-google-gmail/#comment-294783 | title=Slashdot Comments on Google Gmail | author=Elliot Lee | date=2004-03-31 | accessdate=2008-06-01 }}</ref>

== Extended beta phase ==
Gmail began what ended up being a [[Perpetual beta|five-year beta phase]] in March 2004, when Google invited about 1,000 [[Opinion leadership|opinion leaders]] and then allowed them to invite their friends, and family members to become beta testers, with trials beginning on 21 March 2004.<ref>The Google Story, pg 154, yr. 2005, David A. Vise, Mark Malseed</ref> At that time, Google said that Gmail would probably be released publicly after six months of testing,{{cn|date=March 2011}} which would have placed their launch in September 2004. Speculation regarding the release date followed a ''[[The New York Times]]'' indication that they had "credible sources" saying "Gmail will be released publicly by the end of the year 2005."{{cn|date=March 2011}}


[[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 [[Google's hoaxes#2002: PigeonRank|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."<ref>{{ cite web | url=http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/gmail.html | title=Google Gets the Message, Launches Gmail | author=[[Google]] | date=2004-04-01 | accessdate=2008-06-01 }}</ref><ref>{{ cite web | url=http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html | title=PigeonRank: "The technology behind Google's great results" | author=[[Google]] | date=2002-04-01 | accessdate=2008-06-01 }}</ref><ref>{{ cite web | url=http://www.google.com/jobs/lunar_job.html | title=Google Copernicus Center is hiring | author=[[Google]] | date=2004-04-01 | accessdate=2008-06-01 }}</ref><ref>{{ cite web | url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3591589.stm | title=Timing makes Google an April Fool | author=[[BBC News Online]] | date=2004-04-01 | accessdate=2008-06-01 }}</ref>
[[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 [[Google's hoaxes#2002: PigeonRank|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."<ref>{{ cite web | url=http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/gmail.html | title=Google Gets the Message, Launches Gmail | author=[[Google]] | date=2004-04-01 | accessdate=2008-06-01 }}</ref><ref>{{ cite web | url=http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html | title=PigeonRank: "The technology behind Google's great results" | author=[[Google]] | date=2002-04-01 | accessdate=2008-06-01 }}</ref><ref>{{ cite web | url=http://www.google.com/jobs/lunar_job.html | title=Google Copernicus Center is hiring | author=[[Google]] | date=2004-04-01 | accessdate=2008-06-01 }}</ref><ref>{{ cite web | url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3591589.stm | title=Timing makes Google an April Fool | author=[[BBC News Online]] | date=2004-04-01 | accessdate=2008-06-01 }}</ref>

Revision as of 07:34, 5 December 2011


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."[1][2][3][4]

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. By mid-June, the number of invitations had increased, with many users receiving between three and five daily.[citation needed] When Gmail increased the supply of invitations, the buying and selling market for Gmail invites collapsed.[5] On 2 February 2005 the invitation interface was changed to make it easier to give invitations by simply entering an e-mail address. At approximately 3:00 UTC on 3 February 2005 some Gmail users were awarded 50 invitations and later 100 invitations, suggesting that Gmail would soon go public. Attending a Google Mini webinar or using Google Mobile would also yield a Gmail invitation.[citation needed]

During the early months of the initial beta phase, Gmail's well-publicized feature set and the exclusive nature of the accounts caused the aftermarket price of Gmail invitations to skyrocket. According to PC World magazine, Gmail invitations were selling on eBay for as much as US$150, with some specific accounts being sold for several thousand dollars. After a new round of invitations in early June, the price for invitations fell down to between US$2–$5. Several philanthropic Gmail users have utilized services such as the now defunct GmailSwap to donate invitations to people who want them. On 28 June 2004, Google amended its policy to forbid the selling of registered accounts.[6]

In January 2005, Security experts discovered a critical flaw in the handling of Gmail messages that would allow hackers to easily access private e-mails from any Gmail user's account. This was posted with detailed information to popular technology site Slashdot at 9:23 a.m. PST on 12 January 2005. On 13 January 2005, developers at Gmail announced that they had fixed the problem and that the security flaw had been patched. Despite Gmail's status as a beta application, concerns were raised among some users who were using Gmail as their primary mail account.[7] On 1 April 2005, Exactly one year after the initial release, Gmail increased the mailbox size to 2 GB, advertising it as 2GB plus and introduced some other new features, including formatted editing which gave users the option of sending messages in HTML or plain text.

On 13 April 2005, Gmail became available in several languages: British English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian and simplified and traditional Chinese.[citation needed]

On 7 June 2005, The Gmail Invitation Spooler was deactivated by the site owner, following a direct request from the Gmail product manager to shut it down. The service was featured in Popular Science magazine and had given out over 1.2 million Gmail accounts.[8] On 30 June 2005, Gmail became available in 4 new languages: Danish, Finnish, Polish and Swedish.[citation needed] Starting on 11 July 2005, or more likely earlier, Google gave away free Gmail accounts to random people who searched for the word "gmail" using the Google search engine. A promotion link would appear at the top of the page displaying "New! Get Gmail - Google's free e-mail service with over 2GB of storage." This has since expired.[citation needed]

As of 22 June 2005, Gmail's canonical URI changed from http://gmail.google.com/gmail/ to http://mail.google.com/mail/.[9] As of November 2010, those who typed in the former URI were redirected to the latter.

In August 2005, Gmail started offering 100 invitations to some users.[citation needed] On 9 August 2005, Gmail became available in 12 new languages: Bulgarian, Croatian, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Latvian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.[citation needed] On 24 August 2005, Google offered a new method of signing up for a Gmail account via mobile phone text messaging. The public was able to obtain an account by submitting a U.S. mobile phone number to Google, who would then send a text message with an invitation code that would be used to create a Gmail account. Numbers were stored in order to keep track of the number of accounts created which was limited to ten per phone number. This method of creating accounts makes it difficult for spammers to send out spam messages, getting spam delivered, or obtaining an account thus keeping Gmail as spam-free as possible. This method is currently available only to people with a U.S., Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, New Zealand or Turkish mobile phone number.[citation needed] On 30 August 2005, Gmail started to add the ability to customize the address that messages are sent from on outgoing mail, to some accounts. This adds the option for outgoing messages to appear as if they had been sent from an alternative e-mail address, rather than from the Gmail account. At present this option is available only for accounts that have set English (US) as Gmail display language, but users can switch to another language and keep using this feature after adding another address.[citation needed] In the beginning of September 2005, Gmail became available in 9 new languages: Catalan, Czech, Estonian, Hindi, Lithuanian, Romanian, Tagalog, Thai and Turkish.[citation needed] In October 2005, Gmail withdrew the use of username@gmail.com within the UK due to a dispute with the UK company Independent International Investment Research (IIIR), who own the gmail.co.uk domain. From 19 October 2005, any new UK users signing up were compelled to have username@googlemail.com. There is still a concern that old UK users will also have to change to the new domain sometime in the future.[citation needed] In December 2005, Gmail added a "Vacation responder" feature, to provide automatic response to e-mails and also a "Contact Groups" feature, allowing e-mail to be sent to a number of contacts, in a user-defined group.[citation needed] On 16 December 2005, Google quietly released a version of Gmail for mobile devices, providing phone interface access through http://m.gmail.com, named "Gmail Mobile". This product competes with and has features similar to an open source version of Gmail Mobile 1.0 which was launched just 3 weeks earlier by the SourceForge community.[citation needed]

On 17 January 2006, Gmail added a delete button to the menu bar. This now allows users to easily delete their messages.[citation needed] On 7 February 2006, Gmail added the ability for users to chat with others on their contact list when logged into their account. Users have the option to save their chats in a Chat History.[citation needed] On 10 February 2006, Google introduced Gmail for Your Domain. This service, currently in beta testing, allows organizations to offer e-mail services through Gmail using their own domain. On 4 April 2006, Gmail was integrated into the newly released Google Calendar service.[citation needed] From the end of May 2006, Gmail started to support Arabic and Hebrew, which requires support for bi-directional text.[citation needed] In November 2006, It became impossible to use Gmail's full version with browsers using an earlier version of the Gecko than 1.7.x. These previously hung up unless their UA string was modified to something older. This affected Mozilla 1.6, K-Meleon 0.8.2 and lower versions; Therefore Mozilla 1.7.x, Mozilla Firefox 1.x or K-Meleon 0.9 could be used instead.[citation needed] On 2 November 2006, Google began offering a mobile-application based version of its Gmail product for mobile phones capable of running Java applications . In addition, Sprint announced separately that it would make the application available from its Vision and Power Vision homepages, preloaded onto some new Sprint phones. The application gives Gmail its own custom menu system and the site displays attachments, such as photos and documents in the application.[10][11]

On 28 January 2007, Google Docs & Spreadsheets was integrated with Gmail, providing the capability to open attached Microsoft Word DOC files directly from Gmail.[12] On 8 February 2007, Gmail registration was opened to the public, however remained in beta.[citation needed] On 24 October 2007, Google announced that IMAP was available for all accounts, including Google Apps for your Domain.[13] On 5 June 2008, they introduced Gmail Labs[citation needed] On 19 November 2008, they added Themes.[citation needed] On 8 December 2008, Google added a to-do list to Gmail. When the new Tasks feature is enabled, a box shows up on top of the Gmail window. In it, users can add, reorder and delete tasks. It is also possible to assign a due date to each action and even convert e-mails into tasks.[14] On 27 January 2009, they added Offline support via Google Gears[citation needed] On 24 February 2009, Gmail suffered a two and a half hour outage, affecting 100 million accounts.[15] On 7 July 2009, Gmail completed its beta status in a move to attract more business use of the service.[16][17] On 1 Sept 2009, Gmail service was interrupted for several hours.[18]

Gmail officially exited beta status on 7 July 2009.[16][17]

Name change in Europe

The Google Mail logo, distinct from its Gmail logo.
The present Google Mail logo

Germany

The German version of Gmail was first named Gmail Deutschland. Unfortunately for Google, the German company Giersch Ventures had already trademarked G-mail in 2001. The company later filed a lawsuit against Google for trademark infringement.[citation needed]

On 4 July 2005 Google announced that Gmail Deutschland would be rebranded as Google Mail. From that point forward, visitors originating from a German IP address were forwarded to googlemail.com where they could obtain an email address containing the new domain. German users who were already registered were allowed to keep their old addresses. Despite this limitation, German users can still receive email at their corresponding address containing the gmail.com domain. In many respects, the googlemail.com address is simply an alias. German users can have their mail sent to gmail.com by simply changing their reply-to address.[citation needed]

The Giersch Ventures lawsuit also forced Google to change the site's URL from gmail.google.com to mail.google.com, which briefly broke some applications and plugins that relied on this address to access the mail service.[citation needed]

United Kingdom

On 19 October 2005 the UK version of Gmail was converted to Google Mail for reasons similar to those of Germany.[19] 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.[20]

See also

References

  1. ^ Google (2004-04-01). "Google Gets the Message, Launches Gmail". Retrieved 2008-06-01. {{cite web}}: |author= has generic name (help)
  2. ^ Google (2002-04-01). "PigeonRank: "The technology behind Google's great results"". Retrieved 2008-06-01. {{cite web}}: |author= has generic name (help)
  3. ^ Google (2004-04-01). "Google Copernicus Center is hiring". Retrieved 2008-06-01. {{cite web}}: |author= has generic name (help)
  4. ^ BBC News Online (2004-04-01). "Timing makes Google an April Fool". Retrieved 2008-06-01.
  5. ^ Ulbrich, Chris. "Gmail Invitation Prices Crash." Wired. June 10, 2004. Retrieved on November 7, 2009.
  6. ^ Google (2008). "Gmail Program Policies". Retrieved 2008-11-24. {{cite web}}: |last= has generic name (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  7. ^ Wally, Miachael (2005). "Gmail Messages Are Vulnerable To Interception". Retrieved 2008-11-24. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  8. ^ "Gmail Invite Spooler Post-Mortem".
  9. ^ Mathias Bynens (2005-06-25). "Google goes 301". Archived from the original on 2007-08-11. Retrieved 2007-11-25.
  10. ^ Oswald, Ed (2006). "Google Offers Java-based Mobile Gmail". Retrieved 2006-11-02. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  11. ^ Needleman, Rafe (2006). "Google Mail goes mobile. RSS too". Retrieved 2006-11-02. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  12. ^ Rogers, Garett (2007). "Gmail lets you open Word attachments in Google Docs". Retrieved 2008-11-24. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  13. ^ Murray, David (2007). "Sync your inbox across devices with free IMAP". Retrieved 2008-11-24. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  14. ^ Musil, Steven (2008). "Google gives Gmail users a to-do list". Retrieved 2008-12-09. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  15. ^ Gmail crash raises web services fears by Chris Nuttall in the Financial Times
  16. ^ a b Coleman, Keith (2009). "Gmail leaves beta, launches "Back to Beta" Labs feature". Retrieved 2009-07-07. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  17. ^ a b Vanacore, Andrew (2009). "Gmail drops 'beta' label to woo business customer". Retrieved 2009-07-07. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  18. ^ BBC NEWS | Technology | Engineer error knocks out Gmail
  19. ^ Google (2005). "Google Mail in the UK". Retrieved 2008-11-24. {{cite web}}: |last= has generic name (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  20. ^ Bullock, Greg (2010). "Google Mail is becoming Gmail in the UK". Retrieved 4 May 2010. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

External links

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of: Gmail
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