# Gmail turns 20 today.

By [Andrei](https://paragraph.com/@andrei-3) · 2024-04-03

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The creation of the service was kept secret until the start of closed beta testing, and development took 3 years.

At the time of release, it offered 1 GB of storage, keyword search and sorting of letters into folders.

Gmail came out of beta testing after 5 years, and by 2012 it had 425 million active users.

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*Originally published on [Andrei](https://paragraph.com/@andrei-3/gmail-turns-20-today)*