According to Google, the software had been used internally for "a number of years" before it was released to the public in 2004. Initially the software was available only internally as an email system for Google employees. When the service was finally launched in April 2004, about a dozen people were working on the project.
In August 2003, another new Google recruit, Kevin Fox was assigned the task of designing Gmail's interface. Gmail's first product manager, Brian Rakowski, learned about the project on his very first day at Google in 2002, fresh out of college. īuchheit had been working on Gmail for about a month when he was joined by another engineer, Sanjeev Singh, with whom he would eventually found the social-networking startup FriendFeed after leaving Google in 2006. After considering alternatives such as 100 MB, the company finally settled upon 1 GB of space, compared to the 2 to 4 MB that was the standard at the time. Advanced search capabilities eventually led to considerations for providing a generous amount of storage space, which in turn opened up the possibility of allowing users to keep their emails forever, rather than having to delete them to stay under a storage limit. īuchheit recalls that the high volume of internal email at Google created "a very big need for search". Buchheit attempted to work around the limitations of HTML by using the highly interactive JavaScript code, an approach that ultimately came to be called AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). Īt the time when Gmail was being developed, existing email services such as Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail featured extremely slow interfaces that were written in plain HTML, with almost every action by the user requiring the server to reload the entire webpage.
The project was known by the code name Caribou, a reference to a Dilbert comic strip about Project Caribou. At Google, Buchheit had first worked on Google Groups and when asked "to build some type of email or personalization product", he created the first version of Gmail in one day, reusing the code from Google Groups. Buchheit began his work on Gmail in August 2001. Gmail was a project started by Google developer Paul Buchheit, who had already explored the idea of web-based email in the 1990s, before the launch of Hotmail, while working on a personal email software project as a college student.