When Gmail launched with a silly press release Next week it will be 20 years and many assumed it was a hoax. The service promised a gigantic 1 gigabyte of storage, an excessive amount in an era of 15-megabyte inboxes. It claimed to be completely free at a time when many inboxes were paid. And then there was the date: the service was announced on April Fool's Day, foreshadowing some kind of prank.
But soon, invites to the actual beta version of Gmail started going out, and they became a must-have for a certain type of in-the-know tech geek. At my nerdy high school, having one was the quickest ticket to the cool kids table. I remember trying to locate one myself. I didn't know if I really needed Gmail, just that all my colleagues said Gmail would change my life forever.
Teenagers are notoriously dramatic, but Gmail revolutionized email. It reimagined what our inboxes were capable of and became a central part of our online identities. The service now has approximately 1.2 billion users (about 1/7 of the world's population) and today it is a practical necessity to do anything online. It often seems like Gmail has always been here and always will be.
But 20 years later, I don't know anyone who's eager to open Gmail. Managing your inbox is often a chore, and other messaging apps like Slack and WhatsApp have come to dominate the way we communicate online. What was once a revolutionary tool sometimes seems to have been pushed aside. In 20 years, will Gmail still be as central to our lives? Or will it (and email) be a thing of the past?
What most people remember about the launch of Gmail is the free storage. What Google remembers is search.
“If you think about the kind of value proposition that Gmail brought to the table when we started, it was lightning-fast search,” says Ilya Brown, Google's vice president of Gmail. People were tired of email management, Brown says. Spam was everywhere and inbox storage was minuscule. You had to constantly delete emails to make room for new ones. Gmail's gigantic storage limit solved that.
But the Gmail fix also introduced a new problem: you now had too many emails. That's where Google's search prowess comes into play. If you never delete emails, a quick and reliable search is a must.
If you never delete emails, a quick and reliable search is a must
Google has modified the Gmail formula over time. In 2008, Google introduced themes, making the Gmail inbox much more whimsical than the competition. (The little tea drinking fox and I have been friends since then.) You now get 15 GB of free storage. Gmail went mobile in the mid-2000s. And Google has made smaller changes, like adding email priorities, smart replies, summary cards, and the one-click button to unsubscribe from that newsletter you definitely don't. Do you remember subscribing?
Even with all the changes, Gmail feels largely the same. (However, I guarantee that if you look an old Gmail photoyou will be surprised how much has changed.) That may have to do with the few big or disruptive changes that have been made in the intervening years. At launch, Google was free to modify the email formula to its liking. After decades, the company must be careful not to disrupt the most used email service in the world.
“What we take very seriously is building for the things that (Gmail users) need,” says María Fernández Guajardo, senior director and product manager at Gmail. A product like Gmail comes with high expectations of reliability. While Google is interested in experimenting, the company must take special care when implementing new features and explaining how they will affect the product.
This could be why Google has made so few major changes over the years. While online communication has accelerated with direct messages, group chats, and corporate messaging tools, most of that has happened inside or outside of Gmail. Email still has its place, but it is no longer the central way we communicate. I used to keep Gmail open in my browser to talk to my friends and colleagues via Gchat. Now I live in Slack with my Gmail on the side.
When you have enough storage to never have to delete anything, you can keep an infinite record of your life. Packages, receipts, itineraries from previous trips, messages from loved ones, photos, appointments, documents… you can simply tag them, archive them and search for them later.
Much of this is detritus, but there are special moments mixed within. Email was how I kept in touch with my parents when I moved abroad in my 20s. Now that they are gone, I am grateful to have a record of that love in my Gmail. When I look up those emails, I feel like I'm traveling back in time. I saw old college internship applications and grimaced as I read my old resume. There were ridiculous e-cards from my high school friends. Most embarrassing breakup email from my first real heartbreak. A whole battle plan with friends to defeat Ticketmaster for hamilton Tickets. Little things that teleported me to a different place in my life.
Most of those communications are now done through text messages or social media direct messages, a decentralized communications network meant to be much more disposable. It's not as easy to search your direct messages as it is to search your inbox. Slack requires you to pay if you want to access older messages. Scrolling through my TikTok DMs to find a video a friend sent is tedious if it didn't happen in the last two days. I often feel the need to take screenshots of chats I want to remember, only to have them lost in my camera roll. Gmail's ability to archive remains unmatched.
Gmail is like a passport to the Internet
As Gmail became too slow for daily communication, email became the “official” communication channel, a place for things you need tangible, searchable records of. It's taken the fun out of it. I had to create a simple email address because my high school one was too embarrassing. New parents often make emails for them newborn childrenboth to secure an address and as a kind of digital baby book.
“We definitely recognize that Gmail is almost like an identity. It's almost like it's a representative of you to the outside world,” says Brown. “How do we help the identity evolve with (Gmail) users over time? We don't have a solution yet, but we've been thinking about it.”
Gmail is like a passport to the Internet. Every time I create a new account for a site or service, it is linked to my Gmail. It often doubles as my username. My Gmail is my ticket to all my apps, healthcare, taxes, bank accounts… my entire digital life. If I am blocked from accessing something, I go to my Gmail to access it again. I may not be excited about opening Gmail anymore, but my Gmail password is still the most important password in my life.
Sometimes I wake up to 100 newsletters and marketing emails and feel the need to burn them all and start over with a quiet, anonymous inbox. But the reality is that there is too much to lose. I've moved four times in 10 years, but my email remains the same. Every day I have a friend attack his social media account, but no one gets up to announce that he's quitting email. (Will Slack and TikTok be here in 20 years?) I can imagine what a headache it would be to set up a new email to allow all what we know, and the people who would be left behind. There is no doubt that Gmail will endure; What I'm less sure of is what my relationship with him will be.
Google seems aware of this dichotomy and says it wants to make email less work, to return some of that initial joy to the inbox.
No one gets up to announce they're quitting email.
“We want to think about the different enjoyable moments that aren't always associated with the email itself,” Brown says. “Sometimes it's things you didn't have to do or things that help you do something faster.”
For example, if you email a colleague to order a coffee, perhaps Gmail's ai will show a recommendation for a local coffee shop and place it in your Google Calendar. To me, it sounds like turning Gmail into a personal assistant or digital library for my life. It's still a way to manage an endless archive of my life, but maybe that's exactly what email is now. Maybe we can't reinvent the inbox, just make it less horrible to manage.
