Last month Gmail turned 20. For a company that has a history of axing products, two decades is a big milestone. It must also means Gmail did something right. Will email even be relevant in another 20?

I remember first encountering Gmail when a friend offered me an invite. I was approaching graduation and needed a new email to replace my @edu. My only email address at the time and my first. A nostalgic look back from the Verge:

The thing most people remember most about Gmail’s launch is the free storage. What Google remembers is the search.

“If you think about the kind of value proposition that Gmail brought to the table when we first started, it was about lightning-fast search,” says Ilya Brown, Google’s VP of Gmail. People were tired of email management, Brown says. Spam was everywhere, and inbox storage was tiny. You constantly had to delete emails to make room for new ones. Gmail’s giant storage limit solved that.

Read more!

And check out the original press release from 2004:

Google Gets the Message, Launches Gmail