Gmail, Google’s massively popular web-based email that took the world by storm is five years old today. Gmail made waves five years ago by offering over a gigabyte of free web-based storage that steadily increased. People could also see their storage increasing in real time by means of a storage count ticker on Gmail’s homepage.
The email service soon became renowned for “its search, don’t sort” feature that encouraged people never to delete their old emails since they could simply find what they were looking for. For those of us who were too lazy to sort out and store messages in conventional email folders (that would be 99.99 of netizens) this was a real boon since we didn’t have to go through all our email to order, search or organize messages. We could simply search for what we wanted, and Google’s search function would pull out messages with amazing accuracy.
Gmail later added Labels, a first in the industry. This further eliminated the need for folders since people could categorize messages effectively and see at first glance what a message was about.
