Google chosed April Fool's Day to announce the launch of Gmail in 2004 to make people to believe it was a hoax as free web-base e-mail with one gigabyte of storage was imposible on those days since Hotmail was offering 2 MB and Yahoo was offering 4 MB of mail storage. Actually, this was a marketing strategy to make people thing that the product is hoax, spread the word around and then to surprise them when they realize that it is actually real. (Check: google's hoaxes) In addition, on April 1^st, 2005, Google announced the increase of storage to 2 GBs. 

In April 2005, Google started to increase Gmail storage as part of their "Infinity+1" storage plan promising to give more space to Gmail users. They put a storage counter on Gmail. On October 12, 2007, they announced that they speeded up the counter to give more mail storage.

Google Storage Counter

Actually, they updated gmail's storage estimation. The new estimation script indicates that the storage will be:

1. 4.2 GB by the 23rd of October
2. 6 GB by the January 4^th, 2008
3. 42 GB by the year 2038
4. 2.70266701 × 10⁷⁵ GB by the year 3456
   
   

// Estimates of nanite storage generation over time.
var CP = [
   [1175414400000, 2835],
   [1192176000000, 2912],
   [1193122800000, 4321],
   [1199433600000, 6283],
   [2147328000000, 43008],
   [46893711600000, Number.MAX_VALUE]
];

Google also updated the rates for paid storage:

Before the October 12, 2007:

• 6 GB ($20.00 USD per year)
• 25 GB ($75.00 USD per year)
• 100 GB ($250.00 USD per year)
• 250 GB ($500.00 USD per year) 
  
  

Now: 

• 10 GB ($20.00 USD per year)
• 40 GB ($75.00 USD per year)
• 150 GB ($250.00 USD per year)
• 400 GB ($500.00 USD per year)
  
  

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