Gmail
Also known as: Google Mail
Gmail (in full Google Mail) is Google's free e-mail service. Introduced in April 2004, Gmail was startling at the time for two reasons. On the one hand, because a free e-mail box of 1 gigabyte was offered, a revolution at the time (Hotmail.com offered 2 MB for free at the time). On the other, because applying for a Gmail account initially required an invitation.
Gmail users get a free e-mail address ending in "@gmail.com" and can read and send e-mail messages via webmail. Official Gmail apps for various mobile platforms can also be used, and IMAP and POP3 are available.
Since Gmail's inception, the amount of storage space available has been continuously increasing. At the beginning of 2015, it amounted to 15 GB. With this space, Google wants to differentiate its email product from competitors. Over the years, some products have been developed by Google that build on the success of Gmail. An example of a paid service is Google Apps for Business, a bundle of business online services, including business email.
Signing up for Gmail was initially invite-only. When the service was launched, a limited group of Internet users were invited to create an account. They could then invite new users on a limited scale. In this way, hype was created around Gmail; if you wanted to try Gmail, you had to wait until someone close to you could and wanted to share an invite with you. This is a tactic that Google and others subsequently used with other products as well, often with fair to great success.
In some countries, the name Gmail cannot be used due to trademark issues. In England and Germany, for example, the service went by the name "Google Mail" for a long time.