Internet Mail

Windows Live Hotmail, formerly known as MSN Hotmail and commonly referred to simply as Hotmail, is a free web-based email service operated by Microsoft as part of its Windows Live group.

Hotmail was founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith. It was one of the first web-based e-mail services, and was launched in July 1996 as "HoTMaiL", its name and capitalization referring to HTML, the encoding language used by the World Wide Web; simultaneously, it was also one of the first free e-mail providers. It was funded by the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. It was subsequently acquired by Microsoft in 1997 for an estimated $400 million, and shortly after it was rebranded as "MSN Hotmail". The current version, "Windows Live Hotmail", was officially announced in 2005 and released worldwide in 2007.Windows Live Hotmail features 5GB of storage that expands as necessary, patented security measures,Ajax technology, and integration with Windows Live Messenger, Spaces, Calendar, and Contacts. It has over 270 million users worldwide as of 2008. It is available in 36 different languages.

The Hotmail development and operations teams are based in Mountain View, California.

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) is an American public corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, (in Silicon Valley), that provides Internet services worldwide. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine (Yahoo! Search), Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, advertising, online mapping (Yahoo! Maps), office productivity, video sharing (Yahoo! Video), and social media websites and services.

Yahoo! was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 and was incorporated on March 1, 1995.

On January 13, 2009, Yahoo! appointed Carol Bartz, former executive chairperson of Autodesk, as its new chief executive officer and a member of the board of directors.

According to Web traffic analysis companies (including Compete.com, comScore,Alexa Internet, Netcraft,and Nielsen Ratings), the domain yahoo.com attracted at least 1.575 billion visitors annually by 2008.The global network of Yahoo! websites receives 3.4 billion page views per day on average as of October 2007[update]. It is the second most visited website in the U.S., and in the world

Gmail is a free webmail, POP3 and IMAP service provided by Google.In the United Kingdom and Germany it is officially called Google Mail.

Gmail was launched as an invitation-only beta release on April 1, 2004 and it became available to the general public on February 7, 2007. Although over 100 million users have opened Gmail accounts over the years, to this day[update] the service remains in beta status.

With an initial storage capacity offer of 1 GB per user, Gmail significantly increased the webmail standard for free storage from the 2 to 4MB its competitors offered at that time. The service currently offers over 7300 MB of free storage with additional storage ranging from 10 GB to 400 GB available for $20 to $500 (US) per year.

Gmail has a search-oriented interface and a "conversation view" similar to an Internet forum. Software developers know Gmail for its pioneering use of the Ajax programming technique.