Gmail debuted on April Fool’s Day 20 years ago. The joke is still on us.

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Andrew Paul is Popular Science‘s staff writer covering tech news. Previously, he was a regular contributor to The A.V. Club and Input, and has had recent work featured by Rolling Stone, Fangoria, GQ, Slate, NBC, as well as McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. He lives outside Indianapolis.

A completely free email service offering 1 GB of storage, integrated search capabilities, and automatic message threading? Too good to be true. At least, that’s what many people thought 20 years ago today, when Google announced Gmail’s debut. To be fair, it’s easy to see why some AP News readers wrote letters claiming the outlet’s reporters had unwittingly fallen for Google’s latest April Fool’s Day prank.

“Scanning personal communications in the way Google is proposing is letting the proverbial genie out of the bottle,” they cautioned. “Today, Google wants to make a profit from selling ads. But tomorrow, another company may have completely different ideas about how to use such an infrastructure and the data it captures.” But the worries didn’t phase Google.

 

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Gmail revolutionized email 20 years ago, people thought it was Google’s April Fools’ Day jokeBesides the quantum leap in storage, Gmail also came equipped with Google’s search technology so users could quickly retrieve a tidbit from an old email, photo or other personal information stored on the service.
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