24

It was five years ago yesterday that Gmail launched by giving out a gig. Back then, a typical webmail account could only store about five megabytes of mail. It’s hard to remember what those days were like, considering that today, you can send a single 20 megabyte attachment, four times the size of an entire webmail account from 2004. A gigabyte of online storage may have been what got a lot of people to give Gmail a try, but changes to the email experience — like search, labels, conversation view, and strong spam protection — seem to be what kept people around.
With all the new April fool’s bash of fooling people around and creating hoaxes, Google sure seemed to celebrate the birthday very well…. :P