Google Gmail®

Google Gmail Patent Print "Gmail" Bucheit et al, March 31, 1994. Gmail is now recognised around the world as the best free, advertising-supported email service available online. It was developed by Paul Bucheit who was Google's 23rd employee. Originally Gmail was called Caribou inside Google which was named after a Gilbert cartoon called "Project Caribou". Gmail started as a limited beta release on April 1, 2004 and offered an initial storage capacity offer of 1 GB per user. This was a significantly higher number than the 2 MB its competitors such as Hotmail offered at that time. In Founders at Work, Bucheit talks about how most people thought that the storage capacity was a prank. According to Bucheit, "a lot of people didn't think that was real, they thought it was a joke - particularly because we launched on April 1." This patent titled 'Email Conversation Management System' was filed on the 31st of March, 2004 which was the day before Google launched the service. I