Gmail Celebrates Fifth Birthday, Still in Beta

Posted 04/02/2009 at 7:23am | by Paul Lilly

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The launch of a new free email service with the promise of a full gigabyte of storage space was no prank when Gmail was first made available on April 1, 2004, otherwise known as April Fools Day. Five years later, the wildly popular (among techies) webmail continues to benefit with frequent feature enhancements (Mail Goggles, anyone?). And five years later, Gmail is still in beta.

"Google Mail was born out of an experimental project created by a few engineers at Google five years ago," a Google spokesperson said. "From the beginning, we wanted Gmail to be a faster, cleaner, and more intuitive solutin for people's email."

Surprisingly, Gmail has yet to gain mass appeal among the general public, despite having long since abandoned its invite-only system for signing up. Accorded to Hitwise stats, Gmail only claimed 6 percent of the webmail market last year, compared to Yahoo Mail's 55 percent and Microsoft Windows Live at 26 percent. However, Google's Gmail service continues to grow, and to the tune of 43 percent last year according to comScore.