| Company | |
| Website | gmail.com |
| Blog | gmailblog.blogspo... |
| Stage | Beta |
| Launched | 4/04 |
Gmail, also known as Google Mail, is a free email service with innovative features like “conversation view” email threads, search-oriented interface and plenty of free storage (almost 7GB). Gmail opened in private beta mode in April 2004 by invite only. At first, invites were hard to come by and were spotted up for sell on auction sites like eBay. The email service is now open to everyone and is part of Google Apps. Paul Buchheit, an early employee at Google, is given credit for building the product.
Another Gmail feature is the organization, tracking and recording users’ contact lists. For instance, if you start typing the letter C into the “To” field Gmail will bring up a list of every email address and contact name starting with the letter. This feature helps when you can’t quite remember a name. Plus, Gmail automatically adds and updates email addresses and names to your contact list when you write emails.
In June 2008, Gmail Labs was introduced. It’s a tab on top of settings, that lists features that are rough and have gone through almost no filtering. Any Google Engineer can code a labs feature in 20% time. Once it’s working it will go out to users in the next code build. The most popular add-ons will eventually be built into Gmail.
