Guide Note
Yahoo Mail is a free e-mail service sponsored by Yahoo. Like other email services, Yahoo mail does not offer any POP3 or IMAP settings so you can use another e-mail client. There are two versions of Yahoo mail, the regular mail client and the new Yahoo mail which acts more like a regular e-mail client but still through a web browser.
Fast Facts
- Yahoo Mail is free but extra paid services are optional
- Launched: 1996
- Yahoo! is the largest E-Mail service
- Has been open source since 2006
- June 18, 2008: Launched Ymail to offer additional options for choosing an email account name
History
Yahoo Mail was founded in 1996 when investment banker JoJo Healy invested in the company to form a free webmail client. With the Internet becoming more popular in the late 1990s, more competition started appearing. In order to stay competitive, Yahoo tried to buy Hotmail, but they were purchased by Microsoft instead. On April 1, 2004, Gmail officially launched giving users 1GB of storage. This caused all of the current webmail providers to start increasing their free storage to keep up with each other.
Features
Yahoo Mail, like other webmail services, offers basic e-mail capability. Yahoo mail now offers unlimited storage so people are free to store as many e-mails as they want, within reason.
How Yahoo Benefits
Yahoo benefits by showing advertisements on all pages when you attempt to log in to your e-mail. Advertisements are also placed into the signature of all e-mails sent and received. This allows Yahoo to give free storage, but they cannot offer POP3 or IMAP services, otherwise they would start to lose money.
