Gmail: 9 years and counting

Posted by Zohair Hyder, Software Engineer

This April marks Gmail’s 9th birthday, and as year ten gets underway, it’s a good opportunity to look at how much has changed: the curse of the Bambino was broken, Martin Scorsese finally won an Oscar, and we stopped referencing Xena the Warrior Princess in our blogposts. And during that time, Gmail—and online communication as a whole—evolved too.

So much of that evolution is a result of your feedback. In fact, Gmail was inspired by one user’s feedback that she was tired of struggling to find emails buried deep in her inbox. So we built a new email that leveraged the power of Google Search. You told us you were tired of spam, so we set to tackling that, and today your feedback makes it possible for Gmail to filter out well over 99% of incoming spam. You also said that you needed tools to deal with information overload, so we introduced Priority Inbox to help you manage your email (and we’re still exploring new ways to make it even easier).

Simply put, whether you’ve been a Gmail user for 9 years or 9 months, your input helps us continue to keep Gmail current and useful. Thanks for taking this journey with us, and onward to year ten!