Gmail, the email service that almost started out as a joke but rose to become a dominant player in the space, is exactly 20 years old on April 1.
It is for most of us, as hard to imagine a world without Gmail as it is for us to search without Google. But Gmail was a latecomer to the email game, arriving decades after we started using computers to deliver electronic messages to third-party providers who would, like the old-school post office, sort and send them along to their proper digital destination. It was well after MSMail and ccMail but early enough that we still demanded a hyphen between “e” and “mail.”
