Gmail's Early Launch

GMail was a huge leap over existing web mail providers. Where others might give you tens of megabytes, GMail started with a gig and showed a ticker for its growth on the log in page. They offered keeping emails forever and making them searchable. People were willing to wait.

I think Gmail started with a promise of unlimited email storage.

Gmail was unlimited space, and invite only in the early days.The main reason for success was that Google was still generally seen as a not evil company, while other mail providers were garbage/evil.

Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail

Was Gmail really 10x better than Hotmail?

IIRC, gmail was once invite-only

Maybe Gmail was not the first free email, but was definitely the first massively adopted free email with a very high storage capacity.At Gmail's launch, Hotmail was offering only 2MB of free space, while Gmail was offering 1GB. At the time, that was a game changer, and how they captured a good chunk of the market.

But didn't Gmail start out as invite only? Look at how it turned out.

I disagree. I never saw an ad for gmail. The initial exclusivity was a gimmick, but it was dropped pretty quickly. As I recall any user could invite 10 people, including their own email accounts. Also I got like 25 more invites for reasons I can't remember after 3 people signed up with my codes. If you couldn't find someone with an invite code, you weren't asking the right people.I remember having to actively manage my storage space on Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. Some email clients

GMail was invite only, limited signup for the first 12 months, which is what got people to move from Hotmail and Yahoo, the big ones.