Google's e-mail service, Gmail, was first launched on April Fools Day 2004 and was mistaken for a joke before it became known as a "serious" new service.
Although now synonymous with Google, long before popularized by the internet giant, the name "Gmail" has actually been used by other parties, namely Paws Inc, cartoon studio owned by Garfield cat character character owner, Jim Davis.
"Gmail" or rather G-mail where the letter "G" stands for "Garfield" has been used by the warganet at least since 1998, or nearly 20 years ago when Google just started its life as a search engine and was busy looking for capital.
This is known from the captured images of G-mail sites stored by the internet history collector, Internet Archive, as shown below.
Because it's more used by the cat Garfield, Google launched the same e-mail service many years later, alleged that the company took over the gmail.com domain of Paws Inc.
The cartoon studio uses another domain, ie gmail.garfield.com, a subdomain of the Garfield.com site for its G-mail service.
Other information circulating on the internet says that gmail.com domain has been registered since 1995. It means he is older than Google and the main domain of Google.com though.
The initial owner of the Gmail.com domain is a company called US Email. In the early 2000s, US Email closes and ownership Gmail.com had moved hands before it was finally taken by Google in early 2004.
