History
The growth in the number of Internet users eventually boosted the email technology, but also created a very competitive environment where the winner was the first company to launch a successful email service and attract potential users. Email became one of the most important features of a Web company as it would mean regular visits from email users to the website.
When Hotmail and Mirabilis (the creator of the instant messenger ICQ) were looking to be bought, Yahoo! was the first company to which both made offers. Yahoo!, however, passed on both companies as they were too expensive for Yahoo! at that time. In the end, Microsoft ended up buying Hotmail for US$400 million and AOL bought Mirabilis for $288 million.
Yahoo! made a deal with the online communications company Four11 for co-branded white pages. Marvin Gavin, who worked at Four11 as director of international business development said, "We always had a bias about being acquired by Yahoo! They were more entrepreneurial than Microsoft. We had a great cultural fit – it made a lot of sense." The real point in acquiring Four11 was that in March 1997, the company had launched Rocketmail, a webmail system that could be offered to users. In the end, Yahoo! concluded a deal with Four11 for $96 million. Yahoo! announced the acquisition on October 8, 1997, very close to the time that Yahoo! Mail was launched. Yahoo! Mail resulted from an acquisition rather than internal platform development because, as Healy said, "Hotmail was growing at thousands and thousands users per week. We did an analysis. For us to build, it would have taken four to six months, and by then, so many users would have taken an email account. The speed of the market was critical."
The transition to Yahoo! Mail was not easy for many Rocketmail users at first. Yahoo! released various help pages to try to help these users. Soon after, on March 21, 2002, Yahoo! cut free software client access and introduced the $29.99 per year Mail Forwarding Service. Mary Osako, a Yahoo! Spokeswoman, told CNET, "For-pay services on Yahoo!, originally launched in February 1999, have experienced great acceptance from our base of active registered users, and we expect this adoption to continue to grow."
During the summer of 2002, the Yahoo! network was gradually redesigned. On July 2, Yahoo.com was redesigned and it was announced that other services like Yahoo! Mail would enter the same process. Along with this new design, new features were to be implemented, including new navigation tools, such as drop-down menus in DHTML and different category tabs, and a new user-customizable color scheme.
In November of the same year, Yahoo! launched another paid service: Yahoo! Mail Plus. Yahoo! Mail Plus offered a number of new features, including:
- 25 megabytes of email storage
- 10 megabyte message size limit
- Ability to send up to 10 attachments per email
- POP Access and Forwarding
- Archiving of email messages to a hard drive for offline access
- Ability to send messages from Yahoo! Mail using other email domains
- 200 blocked addresses and 50 filters to help screen unsolicited emails
- No promotional taglines in messages
- No account expiration.
On April 1, 2004, Google announced a free webmail with 1 gigabyte of storage. Though Gmail, Google's email service, offered a large amount of storage, its invitation-only accounts kept the other webmail services at the forefront. Most of the major webmail providers like Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, and AOL followed Google's lead and increased their mailbox storage considerably. Yahoo! was the first provider to announce 100 MB of storage for basic accounts and 2 GB of storage for premium users. Determined not to lose customers, Yahoo! Mail then countered Hotmail and Google by increasing the storage quota of its free email accounts to 1 GB, and eventually removing a storage limit altogether and allowing unlimited storage.
On July 9, 2004, Yahoo! acquired Oddpost, a webmail service that simulated a desktop email client like Microsoft Outlook. Oddpost had new features such as drag-and-drop support, right-click menus, RSS feeds, a preview pane, and increased speed, using email caching to shorten response time, and many of these features were incorporated into an updated Yahoo! Mail service.
On August 30, 2007, Walter Mossberg wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Yahoo! would be releasing the new version over the next few weeks. On September 17, 2010 Yahoo showed off the new Mail program to reporters.
Read more about this topic: Yahoo! Mail
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