Gmail turns 20: Sundar Pichai says, 'Glad it wasn't an April Fools Day prank' 

Google India joined CEO Sundar Pichai in wishing Gmail a 'happy birthday'.

It has been 20 years since Google launched its email service, Gmail, on  April 1, 2004 and to mark its birthday, Sundar Pichai posted a witty message on X. “Happy 20th birthday, Gmail! Glad it wasn’t an April Fools’ Day prank after all,” he wrote.

Happy 20th birthday, @gmail! Glad it wasn’t an April Fools’ Day prank after all:) https://t.co/fH43qomJ59

— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) April 1, 2024

Google India also marked the day with a fun video with a “forgot attachment” message, highlighting the common “mistake” that most Gmail users have been making till now while using the service.

PFA - Our thanks and regards pic.twitter.com/XmWH7JMTSh

— Google India (@GoogleIndia) April 1, 2024

While social media joined Pichai in wishing Gmail a "happy birthday," not many among them seemed to know that Gmail’s launch by the company’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, was actually thought to be an April Fools’ joke.

Meanwhile, speaking to The Verge, Ilya Brown, Google’s VP of Gmail, said that although most people remember most about Gmail’s launch is the free storage, for the tech giant, the highlight was the search option. Initially, Gmail was launched as a free service, boasting of one gigabyte of storage per account, which was enough to store about 13,500 emails.

“If you think about the kind of value proposition that Gmail brought to the table when we first started, it was about lightning-fast search,” Brown told the publication. People were tired of email management, Brown said, adding amid spamming and a tiny inbox storage, users had to constantly delete emails to make room for new ones. Gmail’s giant storage limit solved that problem.