1 in April of 2004, Google inaugurated it gmail, a service that has since become one of the largest e-commerce platforms post officein the world.
At first, everyone thought it was a joke, another Google April Fool's prank since the company until then was only known for its search engine.
As I was one of the first to get a Gmail account in 2004, I remember the first thing that made a huge impression was the fact that the company gave me a whole GB of space for free.
Want to know how old your Gmail account is?
Check your POP settings
POP settings show the date your Gmail account was created.
To view it, click the gear icon on the top right, select View all settings, and then click Forward and POP / IMAP.
In the POP download section, look at the status bar. You will see the following:
The forums suddenly got very interesting theme discussion, Google's GB and of course who had invitations for the new service, since it was available only through invitations.
Of course, I should add that obtaining a Gmail account was something very difficult. Google used to give 5 invitations to a person, then 10, then up to 50. Today, anyone can register without an invitation.
Gmail was officially released for 7 February 2007.
Unlike many others customers email, Google's Gmail is treated like an app rather than a web page. Google built Gmail in a way that doesn't require the entire web page to reload for the end user to see new messages. It was unthinkable for the time. The company made it a reality using HTML with the addition of some JavaScripts. The idea turned out to be a success, even if many weren't so sure at first.
Today, Gmail is one of the most usable email services. The users of the Google service have from 15 GB of free storage space to share between Google Drive, Gmail and Google+.
Since security always plays an important role for users, Google provides SSL encryption from the beginning operation of her service. First it was optional, until it was finally changed to the default setting for everyone.
After the NSA scandal, the company upgraded all of its SSL certificates to 2048-bit RSA, effectively doubling the protection it offers users.
Finally, Google announced that, for added security, Gmail has encrypted all email messages, even those moving to and from Google data centers. The move came as a reaction to the news that the NSA had infiltrated the company's data centers.
