Come April 30th and Gmail would be completing its 9th birthday. For as long as I remember, Gmail has been the helping stick in the hands of anyone past the age of telegrams and letters (although the latter's death is sad).
Gmail has evolved beautifully over the years with user feedbacks helping a long way to make what it is today.

To quote the company's official blog statement "Gmail was inspired by one user’s feedback that she was tired of struggling to find emails buried deep in her inbox.So we built a new email that leveraged the power of Google Search. You told us you were tired of spam, so we set to tackling that, and today your feedback makes it possible for Gmail to filter out well over 99% of incoming spam."