<p>Gmail's home page as it looked on March 31, 2004, shortly before the service launched Skizzers.org Google's email breakthrough was almost three years in the making. But it wasn't a given that it would reach the public at all</p><p>If you wanted to pick a single date to mark the beginning of the modern era of the web, you could do a lot worse than choosing Thursday, April 1, 2004, the day Gmail launched.</p><p>Scuttlebutt that Google was about to offer a free email service had leaked out the day before: Here's John Markoff of the New York Times reporting on it at the time. But the idea of the search kingpin doing email was still startling, and the alleged storage capacity of 1GB500 times what Microsoft's Hotmail offeredseemed downright implausible. So when Google issued a press release date-stamped April 1, an awful lot of people briefly took it to be a really good hoax. (Including me.)</p><p>Gmail turned out to be real, and revolutionary. And a decade's worth of perspective only makes it look more momentous.</p><p><a href="http://time.com/43263/gmail-10th-anniversary/">Keep reading...</a></p><p>Read also:</p><p><a href="http://money.cnn.com/2014/04/01/technology/gmail/">Gmail at 10: How Google dominated e-mail</a> (CNNMoney)</p><p><a href="http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/31/tech/web/gmail-privacy-problems/">Why Gmail and other e-mail services aren&#039;t really free</a> (CNN)</p><p><a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/04/01/gmail_tenth_anniversary/">That&#039;s it, we&#039;re all really OLD: Google&#039;s Gmail is 10 ALREADY</a> (Register)</p><p>Explore: <a href="http://news.google.com/news/more?ncl=d38z_y5iC64NThMp3oPW7jmXt1OmM&authuser=0&ned=us">225 additional articles.</a></p>