Begging for a Gmail Invite in 2004

Why did anyone have to beg for a Gmail invite? Gmail was Google's free email service, and it was announced on April 1, 2004, with an offer that sounded too good to be true: a full gigabyte of storage. Other free email services gave people a few megabytes, so plenty of people assumed it was an April Fools' joke. It wasn't, but you couldn't just sign up. Gmail was invite only, and for almost three years, getting an account meant knowing someone who had one, begging online or buying an invite.

A joke day, a real inbox

Google picked a strange day to announce something real. On April 1, 2004, it said it was launching an email service with 1 GB of free storage. The same day, Google also posted a joke about hiring people to work at a research center on the moon. With a fake moon base and a real email service on the same page, a lot of people weren't sure which one to believe. The moon base was easier to picture.

The storage was the shocking part. Free email accounts at the time held only 2 to 4 megabytes, which meant you deleted old messages all the time to make room. Gmail gave you about 250 times that. Google told people they'd never need to delete an email again. Anyone who had spent a Sunday night clearing out a Hotmail box to make room for one more message felt that one personally.

Gmail had been tested inside Google for a while before that. Paul Buchheit started working on it in August 2001, and the very first version was built in a single day. Its code name was Caribou.

How did Gmail invites work?

Gmail invites worked by letting existing users invite a limited number of friends. At first, only about 1,000 people got accounts, mostly people Google chose. Blogger users were invited later in April 2004, and more invites went out in rounds after that. In June 2004, every active Gmail user got three invites to give away.

When you had invites, you were suddenly very popular. Friends, cousins and classmates asked for one. Some people handed them out like party favors. Others saved them for people they actually liked, which created its own drama. Getting an invite in your inbox from someone you barely talked to was confusing and a little flattering at the same time.

If you didn't know anyone with Gmail, there were other ways in. A site called Gmail Swap matched people who had spare invites with people who wanted one. People traded invites on message boards for all kinds of things, and a thread titled "I have 3 invites" could fill three pages of replies in an hour.

Gmail invites on eBay

Early on, Gmail invites were rare enough that people sold them. On eBay, invites went for as much as $150, and some accounts with good usernames sold for thousands of dollars. Getting your first name at gmail.com felt like grabbing a great screen name, the same way people had fought over screen names on AIM.

Once more invites went out in June 2004, prices crashed to a few dollars. Google also banned selling accounts later that month. By then, getting in was getting easier, though it still wasn't open to everyone.

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What made Gmail different

Storage was the headline, but other things made Gmail feel new. Instead of folders, you used labels, and a message could have more than one. Replies were grouped into conversations, so a whole back-and-forth showed up together instead of as separate messages. Search worked the way Google search did, so you could find an old email in seconds.

There were also small text ads next to your messages, based on what the email was about. Some people found that creepy at first. Most people decided free gigabytes were worth it.

Compared with an old inbox like your first Hotmail address, which constantly warned you that it was almost full, Gmail felt huge and calm.

The storage counter

Gmail's login page had a storage counter that kept ticking up. On April 1, 2005, the first birthday, Google bumped storage to 2 GB and kept adding more, a little at a time. You could watch the number on the sign-in page slowly grow, which was a surprisingly fun thing to stare at. Nobody had a reason to check it twice, and plenty of us did anyway.

Gmail goes down

As more people moved their whole lives into Gmail, outages started to feel serious. On February 24, 2009, Gmail went down for about two and a half hours, and it affected around 100 million accounts. People who had stopped keeping their own copies of anything suddenly couldn't reach their tickets, homework or work email. Free storage, it turned out, still lived on someone else's computer.

Even so, people stayed. By then, Gmail had changed what everyone expected from email. Other services raised their storage limits, added search and grouped messages into conversations. The tiny inboxes that filled up after a few photos were gone for good.

When did Gmail stop needing invites?

Gmail stopped needing invites on February 14, 2007, when Google opened sign-ups to everyone. Before that, Google had already run a system that sent out invites to people who signed up and waited in line, and it gave out more than 1.2 million accounts before closing in June 2005.

Even after it opened up, Gmail kept a little "beta" label next to its logo. That label stayed until July 7, 2009, more than five years after launch. People joked that Gmail would stay in beta forever.

The Gmail invite, remembered

Most of it comes back as small scenes, and they fit in one old window.

No invite needed

You could always tell who had just gotten in, because their away message changed to something like the one below, just before they stopped answering. If you remember what an away message, you know the type.

FriendCrib doesn't make anyone wait for an invite, though inviting your friends is the best way to fill your Top 8. Make your crib and send a few invites of your own. The old chain emails are not invited.