<p>In 2004, anyone with 2MB of online storage thought they were pretty hot stuff - so when Google announced a free web-based email service with a staggering 1 gigabyte of storage, everybody looked at the date - April 1 - and figured it was an April Fool joke.</p><p>Some joke. Today, Gmail is the world's favourite email system - it blasted past the previous winner, Hotmail, in 2012 - and it continues to offer the familiar combination of a fairly horrible interface* and massive amounts of free storage. That amount is currently 15GB shared across all your Google services.</p><p>It also changed the way we think about communications. Email became something you could search effortlessly, and the huge storage space meant the end of tedious email mailbox management.</p><p>Gmail introduced us to the conversational view of email that dominates email software and services today, made mobile email apps before anyone had heard of an iPhone, and with its recent introduction of a separate tab for promotions it's arguably killed off the email newsletter as an effective marketing tool.</p><p><a href="http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/web/how-google-rescued-us-a-life-of-hotmail-1238747">Keep reading...</a></p><p>Read also:</p><p><a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/04/01/gmail_tenth_anniversary/">SPAM me! Google&#039;s whim Gmail is 10 years old ALREADY</a> (Register)</p><p><a href="http://www.neowin.net/news/10-years-later-google-launching-gmail-on-april-1st-is-still-not-a-joke">10 years later, Google launching G...</a> (Neowin)</p><p><a href="http://www.wired.com/2014/04/gmail-ten/">10 Years On, Gmail Has Transformed the Web as We Know It</a> (Wired)</p><p>Explore: <a href="http://news.google.com/news/more?ncl=dvCG5OUYhS0UI_Mp3oPW7jmXt1OmM&authuser=0&ned=us">42 additional articles.</a></p>