My first Gmail email from Gmail

First off, welcome. And thanks for opening a Gmail account. We hope that Gmail will become something you use everyday.

Gmail is different from other types of email, so we put together some information to help you get started. But you're probably eager to start playing around with your new account, so we'll keep it short. (After all, you can always come back to this email later—just search for it.) 

• Check out our Getting Started guide. It'll introduce you to many of Gmail's features.
• Visit our Help Center to search for answers, browse frequently asked questions, and learn about the cool things you can do with Gmail.
• Import your contacts from Yahoo! Mail, Outlook, Hotmail, and others to Gmail. Email your friends to tell them your brand new Gmail address.

You may also have noticed some text ads or related links to the right of this message. They're placed there in the same way that ads are placed alongside Google search results and, through our AdSense program, on content pages across the web. The matching of ads to content in your Gmail messages is performed entirely by computers; never by people. Because the ads and links are matched to information that is of interest to you, we hope you'll find them relevant and useful.

We're working hard during our limited test to improve Gmail and make it the best webmail service around. Thanks for taking the plunge with us. We hope you enjoy Google's approach to email.

Thanks,

The Gmail Team

P.S. You can sign in to your account any time by visiting http://gmail.google.com

- Excerpt from My first email from Gmail 2004. (12/31/04)

After turning on my 'edit offline' for Google Doc, I told Jen. This google is getting to be 'indispensable'. Who would have thought. 

I was first introduced to Google in a residency/exhibiton in Germany. The show required all the artists to be 'locked' in the gallery for 7 days. We were given food and internet. A fellow artist introduced Google to me then. Look at them today. BIG DATA. a

I remember also the time that Google was offering Gmail to the 'select few'. It was like 'invite me please' - we wanted a gmail account so bad. 

Then it was Google satellite service... and Google is getting bigger. That is just scary for me. 

As I am going to delete this first gmail email, I am thinking back and reminded of how the 'internet' actually inspired a kind of utopian vision. That the 'freedom to exchange, share and broadcast information with people from everywhere' is on hindsight kind of odd. (thinking of what is happening on the internet these days). 

And I am sharing an old generated email. One day this will email will be an antique. 

Transmission out.