In Early 2000’s things were different. Hotmail was one of the most commonly used email client. Emails were different, lots of spam messages, small storage issues and then in 2004, Gmail changed everything.
On 1st April 2004, Google launched Gmail and before you are mistaken, this is no April fool.
Gmail was supported with Google Search in the dashboard. It could group your messages into conversation threads, making it easier to find and reply to them separately. People also got 1GB of data, yes 100% FREE and this all was almost 10 times more than was usually available at the time. Here is how it looked like when it first started.
Gmail has fought spam a long way. Here’s a throwback video from 2007 where the team explains how Gmail counters spam.
The introduction of Google Docs, chats within the email client has taken Gmail to all new paradigm heights.