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Sure, this is what that Wikipedia page says:

> As of 22 June 2005, Gmail's canonical URI changed from http://gmail.google.com/gmail/ to http://mail.google.com/mail/.

As you can see from your own source, the canonical URL has always been under google.com, not under gmail.com.

Edit: the parent post was originally linking to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail, before being edited

Gmail.com was redirecting (still does) and that at the time sub-domains could share cookies with the main domain.

Therefore, gmail.google.com could track cookies and activity via google.com.

This has been fixed since then, so I think the memory of the internet is short and wouldn't understand how bad this was in retrospect.

(my previous edits: Yep, I didn't want to drag this out. My memory was off on something.)