Google Launches Gmail. People Think It’s an April Fools’ Joke.

The mailbox was real. The date did not help.

On Thursday, 1 April 2004, Google introduced Gmail.

A free email service was not, by itself, an extraordinary announcement. The proposed mailbox was.

Gmail offered one gigabyte of storage. Rival free inboxes commonly provided only a few megabytes. Google was promising hundreds of times more room, alongside fast searching and messages grouped into conversations.

For users accustomed to deleting old mail to make space, the proposition required a change of habits. Keep the messages. Search for them later.

There was just one difficulty with believing the announcement.

It was April Fools’ Day.

Google had already established a reputation for April 1 mischief. Now a company associated with improbable jokes was announcing an improbable specification that happened to be true.

The confusion was not merely hypothetical.

The Associated Press later recalled that readers contacted it after its launch-day report, warning that the news agency had fallen for a Google prank.

Reporting the genuine announcement had made the reporters look gullible.

Behind the suspicious timing was real development work. Engineer Paul Buchheit had built an email system around the problems of finding messages and following conversations, rather than repeatedly filing and discarding them.

Gmail was not immediately available to everyone. Its opening was an invitation-only beta, not an unrestricted public sign-up.

Nor was every question about the service a misunderstanding. Its advertising model used automated analysis of messages to select relevant ads, prompting privacy concerns.

Those were questions about a real product. Whether the product existed should have been the easy part.

Instead, the calendar had turned a launch announcement into a credibility test. The storage allowance sounded extravagant, the company liked jokes, and the date actively encouraged suspicion.

Google had introduced a service designed to help people find information.

First, people had to decide whether to believe the information announcing it.