by Mike Masnick at techdirt
Regular readers of Techdirt will know that we’ve never done any sort of April 1st jokes, even though people often send us ideas for them each year. The simple fact is: nearly all April Fools’ jokes are terrible, especially the silly corporate ones. They’re just bad.
With one exception.
Twenty years ago today, Google announced Gmail. And a ton of people assumed it was an April Fool’s joke. After all, Google’s press release reads… kinda like an April Fool’s joke. And Google has a long history of doing fake product announcements as April Fool’s jokes (and none of them are particularly funny).
People who weren’t online pre-Gmail simply do not realize how different the email world was back then. Web-based email systems had really only become popular in the late 90s (prior to that, most people would download their emails to a separate client using things like POP3). In the late 90s you had the rise of Rocketmail (bought by Yahoo and turned into Yahoo Mail) and then Hotmail (bought by Microsoft and turned into Outlook.com).
But both of those “free” web-based email offerings were slow and clunky and only let you store 10 to 15MB of email data at a time (which is… not very much). And you had to organize the email you did want to store in “folders.”
The real April Fool’s part of Gmail was that it was real. It was so incredibly different from…
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