Gmail: 1.8 billion people use it – But they do not know the secret

April 1, 2004

Google launches Gmail and for many, it’s the day the modern age of the internet was “born”.

The information that Google was going to launch a free email service had been circulating since the previous day. But the idea that the “king” of the search would enter the email was a surprise. And offering 1GB of storage, which is 500 times more than Microsoft Hotmail, just seemed impossible. So when Google released its press release on April 1, many believed it was an April Fool’s joke.

But the Gmail it was real and it was revolutionary. It was not just the end of Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, which dominated free email services at the time. It was also the first large cloud application that could replace and not just complement the conventional software of a computer.

Gmail was created by Paul Buchheit, Google’s 23rd employee. In fact, he relied on work he had done a few years before he was even hired by the company in 1999. “I had started making an email program in the past, it must have been in 1996. I had this idea that I wanted to make an email. on the web. “I worked on it for 1-2 weeks and then I got bored,” he would say in an interview.

Of course, many in Google did not like the fact that the company was engaged in something other than search. Their fear was that the product would not be so good and so other big companies like Microsoft would have a chance to “kill” them.

However, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were very supportive of the project.

And so, for the first time, users got one e-mail in which they could keep all their messages without having to delete them.

Five years later, Gmail broke the barrier of 1 billion users. Today, it remains the most popular email platform with over 1.8 billion users.

Gmail has an 18% market share among email clients and is responsible for 27% of new email accounts that open. 61% of people aged 18-29 use Gmail and 306.4 billion emails are sent and received daily in Gmail.

And yet, to this day, most of its 1.8 billion users do not know a basic “trick” of Gmail: The dots in Google’s email addresses do not matter at all. Most of us have a laid back attitude when it comes to painting a picture about ourselves. In fact, it does not need to.

As Google itself says in its Help Center, if a user’s email is [email protected], then he owns all possible versions of this address with or without dots:

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

So the next time you enter your email address, just ignore the dots.

Money Review

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