Webmail is a web application that allows users to read and write e-mail using a web browser.
Webmail is commonly offered as a service by Internet companies, sometimes in exchange for providing personal information for marketing purposes. It may also be offered by one's Internet service provider for remote access to a regular email account. There are many open source programs that allow one to set up an HTTP mail user agent (see external link below).
Some mail servers, such as Microsoft Exchange or Kerio MailServer, contain built-in webmail interface.
Features
Most webmail services have the following features:
Several webmail services offer the following features:
- E-mail spam detection
- POP3 mail retrieval
- anti-virus checking of mail attachments
- dictionary and thesaurus when composing messages
- spell checker
Advantages of webmail services
- Email can be read and composed anywhere a person has access to a web browser and an internet connection.
- Messages do not have to be downloaded.
- Many services allow anonymous sign-ups.
Disadvantages of webmail services
- The user must stay online to read and write more than one email. They cannot easily save mails they are working on (except by cutting and pasting the text). (This has changed now. For example, Gmail, provides a "Save Draft" button when you're composing a mail, and let you save it anytime you want. Although this is not so fast as saving in a local mail-client application like Thunderbird, it allows you to edit the draft later anywhere different from the original computer your composed your draft. Kinds of advantage now.)
- Commercial webmail services often offer only limited email storage space and either display advertisements during use or append them to mails sent. Unlike with a local client, the user cannot keep the messages on their local hard drive.
- Webmail can be hampered by a slow network connection.
- Most emails are usually short, plain text messages of less than 2 KB, but using webmail the original email is wrapped in HTML that can be 40 KB or more. Obviously this brings a significant decrease in speed of use. (Not true if you compose in plain text in webmail. This is not the fault of webmail, it's your choice to do so. But since broadband connection goes popular, this is not a problem. HTML mail allows you to arrange the mail in much more readable format like heading, paragraph, indenting, pictures and tables. )
- If the provider goes down, you no longer have your mails. Although this doesn't happen usually, it's quite possible.
Other features of webmail
- Webmail accounts can be set up and discarded quickly, thus can provide a degree of anonymity.
- The ability to access it anywhere means it is harder to trace the individual who uses an account than if they used a connection associated with their home address.
These features mean it can in theory be more easily used as a communication tool for nefarious purposes (or for avoiding oppressive authorities) than conventional e-mail. In practice, most governments security agencies are fairly easily able to track individuals who try to use such methods, just as with someone who calls from phone booths. Ordinary citizens will find it more difficult, however.
History
Historically, the first webmail service was Hotmail, created in 1995 by Sabeer Bhatia of India. Hotmail became very popular, and was later bought by Microsoft and re-branded MSN Hotmail.
Since then, webmail offerings are widespread, with offers ranging from Chinese portal Sina to European portals such as Voila.fr or GMX.de.
In early 2004, Google announced the arrival of Gmail, a free webmail solution including new features such as a 2 GB storage limit and conversation threading. This has strongly stimulated competition in this sphere, forcing most webmails, and in particular Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail, to review their web-mails offers and increase their storage from a few MB to several hundred MB.
There is webmail software available that allows one to create ones own webmail server, notably open source software such as Horde IMP or Squirrelmail. Many universities take advantage of this software to provide students and faculty with university webmail.
gigabyte storage
Due to the heavy media coverage of Gmail's initial announcement of 1 gigabyte of storage, many existing web mail services quickly increased their storage capacity. This was seen as a move to stop existing users from switching to Gmail, and to capitalize on the newly rekindled public interest in web mail services. Services with a ($) symbol require a payment to use their services. Gmail currently has a quota which is slowly increasing.
- on March 31, 2004, Gmail was initially released with 1 gigabyte of storage space per user. On April 1st, 2005 (Gmail's first birthday), Gmail increased that to more than 2 gigabytes of email storage space per user. This figure and the original offering of 1000 megabytes are hundreds of times more than what other webmail services offered at the time of Gmail's original announcement in 2004.
- On April 5, 2004, Spymac became the first free email service to publicly offer a gigabyte of storage.
- On May 29, 2004, the European edition of Lycos raised its paid storage allowance to 1 GB.
- On June 15, 2004, popular web mail competitor Yahoo! Mail increased its free storage space to 100 MB and its paid storage space to 2 GB. Free storage space for Yahoo! Mail has since increased to 250 MB on December 2, 2004.
- On June 18, 2004, Rediff.com headquartered in Mumbai, India, increased the storage capacity of its free public Rediffmail service to one gigabyte.
- On June 24, 2004, Microsoft's Hotmail announced an increase of storage space to 250 MB and 2 GB for its free and paid email services, respectively.
- Throughout June, the Israeli search site Walla slowly upgraded their service to 1 GB of space and is also offering their service in English.
- In July 2004, Yahoo! Mail acquired Oddpost which was the first service to perfect the instant response functionality of a desktop email client in the browser through JavaScript.
- On July 29, 2004, Yahoo! Mail announced an increase of free storage space to 1 GB but only in China in hopes of getting a foot hold in their booming internet market.
- On March 23, 2005 Yahoo! Mail announced that it will soon (in late April) begin giving users of its free Web e-mail service 1 gigabyte of storage. [1]
Further followers of the big mailbox trend:
External links
