SOME people thought it was an April Fool’s Day joke. Google, king of the internet search, was launching an e-mail service that would let people store the equivalent of 500,000 pages of e-mail for free.

News wires and internet chat rooms initially dismissed the news. Half a million pages (or one gigabyte of storage) is a lot of e-mail — the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, in comparison, has 21,728 pages. And the announcement had many of the hallmarks of an April Fool; it wasn’t particularly funny, contained one ridiculous fact, and the press release was dated April 1. Even the tone of the release was jokey, in a nerdy way: “Search is No 2 online activity — e-mail is No 1: ‘Heck, yeah,’ say Google founders.”

Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and president, said the idea for the new service, called Gmail, came from a Google user complaining about the existing e-mail services such as Yahoo Mail and Microsoft’s Hotmail.

The idea caught the attention of a Google engineer who thought it might be a good “20% time” project — Google requires engineers to spend a day a week on projects that interest them, unrelated to their day jobs. “Millions of M&Ms later, Gmail was born,” said the company.

But for all their forced buffoonery, Google’s founders could not have been more serious. When doubts were raised about the truth of the plans, Google rushed out a more adult statement that made matters plain: “Having conquered the internet search engine and created a new verb in the process, Google intends to take on e-mail.”

It was a move that threw down the gauntlet to some of the world’s most powerful media and technology companies.

As Google’s founders pointed out, e-mail is the No 1 reason why people are drawn to the internet. It is a service that is dominated by Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL, companies that have 100m e-mail accounts between them and that until recently have been Google’s clients.

Google’s move into e-mail brings it head-to-head with its former partners as the company lines up the most hotly anticipated stock-market flotation since the start of the millennium.

Gmail will provide users with a huge one gigabyte (1Gb) of free storage, making the need to clean out the e-mail inbox irrelevant for most people.

Just as Google has reordered the internet universe, the company believes the new service will rewire the way information is retrieved in e-mail messages. Gmail will automatically organise e-mail according to topic and allow users to search their messages — including who it is from, the text and subject lines — in the same way that they search the internet.

When Gmail displays an e-mail, it will also automatically show all the replies to that e-mail, allowing users to see their messages in context.

Jonathan Rosenberg, Google’s vice-president of product management, said the vast storage capability of the service would mean most people would never have to delete their e-mails. As e-mails piled up, they would form a sort of online personal library.

“Our inspiration was to extend our core mission to make people’s information accessible and useful. A lot of people have vital information stored in their e-mail.”