INFO GURU

Five years back Google launched its Gmail services with an offer of a gigabyte of storage on April 1 '04.

Google Mail was born out of an experimental project created by a few engineers at Google five years ago. From the beginning Gmail has been a faster, cleaner and more intuitive solution for people's email.

At first, the service was available by invite only, but opened to the public in 2007. Even though it has been around for five years, Gmail is still listed as a beta, and holds less market share than its rivals.

It was no joke, and Gmail has taken the world of free webmail by storm, forcing others to boost their storage and improve their features. At first, Google’s mail service was available by invite only. To join up, someone with a Gmail account had to send you one of their limited number of invites. It was only opened up to the public in February 2007.

And, despite being part of the Google family, it holds far less market share than its rivals. As of last year, Yahoo Mail had 55 per cent of the market in the US, followed by Microsoft’s Windows Live at 26 per cent. Gmail had just six per cent, according to the Hitwise statistics. That said, comScore reported that Gmail saw growth of 43 per cent last year, so maybe one day it will eventually catch up.

“Since 2004 we've continued to focus on making Google Mail easier and more fun by introducing additions like themes, video chat and Google Mail Labs. We're thankful that so many people have picked Google Mail over the past five years, and we're looking forward to providing them with more innovative features in the future’’, says Google. <