In the blog post announcing Gmail, Google claimed that the new email service came with 1 GB of storage. While this might sound ridiculously low by today’s standards, it was quite incredible back in 2004. To put things into perspective, Gmail offered more than 100x the space available on alternative email services from Yahoo and Hotmail, which offered a paltry 4 MB and 2 MB of space, respectively, on their free tiers at the time.
These incredible claims (for the time) cemented speculation about Gmail being just another April Fools’ joke. After the initial hullabaloo, people (and competitors) quickly noted that Gmail was, indeed, the real thing and that Google meant business when it said every Gmail account would get 1 GB of free storage. This eventually led to rivals responding by increasing their storage capacities by decent amounts. For example, Yahoo went from 4 MB to 100 MB, while Hotmail went from 2 MB to 250 MB within the span of a few months.
Google would go on to further add storage capacity at regular intervals, with free storage increasing to 2 GB in 2005. Another incredible announcement made in 2005 was the promise that Google would keep adding more space to Gmail forever. Gmail’s web interface even showed a ticking counter of the perpetually increasing storage capacity. Google would eventually break that promise and, as of 2024, all free Google accounts get 15 GB of space, with this capacity being shared across multiple Google services. So, if you barely use your Gmail but end up storing 15 GB of images on your Google Drive, you won’t be left with any space for your emails.
