Webmail

Webmail' is a class of web applications that allow users to read and write e-mail using a web browser, or in a more general sense, an email account accessed through such an application.

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. Many companies also provide web-based access to their internal email systems, for use by employees when at home or travelling.

Some mail servers, such as Microsoft Exchange , Kerio MailServer or Atmail, contain built-in webmail interface.

History

Historically, the first webmail service was Hotmail, created in 1995 by Sabeer Bhatia of India and Jack Smith. 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 search-based webmail solution including new features such as a 1 GB storage limit (now expanded to over 2.5 GB, and currently growing at a rate of 13 to 14 kilobytes per hour), conversation threading and labels to replace the need for folders. It also features small contextual text-based advertisements based upon the content of messages (though for a short while this did provoke some privacy concerns). This has strongly stimulated competition in this sphere, forcing most webmails, and in particular Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail, to update their webmail interface and increase their storage from a few megabytes to several hundred megabytes or more.

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. Also, more and more Internet Service Providers offer webmail for their customers. The market for webmail has two primary competitors: Hotmail has a 33% market share and Yahoo Mail has a 30% share. Gmail, despite causing quite a stir of publicity, only has 4%, mainly due to its invite only policy. The remaining market share is held by much smaller providers.

Features

Most webmail services have the following features:

• folders
• filtering (incoming email to dispatch to related folder)
• trash folder
• address book

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

• Web browsers are always available at internet cafes, terminal emulations and email clients typically are not
• Assuming the webmail user logs out of the service and the site's pages are not cached locally (most are encrypted anyway), email messages are not stored locally on the user's hard drive, thus are not usually at risk of data retrieval should the hard drive be searched.

Disadvantages of webmail services

• The user must stay online to read and write more than one email. They cannot easily edit mails they are working on offline (except by cutting and pasting the text).
• 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.
• Most emails are usually short, plain text messages of less than 2 kB, but using webmail the original email is wrapped in the website's HTML, which can be 40 kB or more. Obviously this brings a significant decrease in speed of use, especially on a slow network connection.

Other features of webmail

• Webmail accounts can be set up with minimum technical competence and provide independence from one's current ISP as well as 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.

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, as did many ISPs. 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. Below is a brief outline of the course of events following Gmail's initial release.

• 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 each user's storage quota to more than 2 gigabytes. This new 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 open-to-the-public free email service to 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 was later 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 increased storage space to 250 MB and 2 GB respectively for its free and paid email services for users in America.
• Throughout June, the Israeli search site Walla upgraded their service to 1 GB of space.
• On July 29, 2004, Yahoo! Mail increased space to 1 GB for its users in China in hopes of getting a foothold in the country's booming internet market.
• On March 21, 2005, Streamload announced the launch of xStreamMail. The first email enhancement system specifically designed for sending and sharing collections of full-quality videos and photos, xStreamMail users are given 10 GB of free email storage and file attachment limits to paying subscribers of 50 terabytes per email.
• On March 23, 2005, Yahoo! Mail announced that it will soon (in late April) begin giving all users of its free Web e-mail service 1 gigabyte of storage.
• On April 1, 2005, its first anniversary, Gmail increased its storage size to 2 GB, and its storage has increased constantly since then at a rate that works out to 1 GB per year, a rate that Google pledges it will keep up as long as its servers have room.
• On May 11, 2005, AOL announced AIM Mail, a free Web e-mail service with 2 gigabyte of storage.
• On June 6, 2005, AOL announced unlimited email storage for its paying subscribers.
• On October 8, 2005, Runbox announced 10 GB email storage for its subscribers with a 1 GB Files storage.

External links

• Webmail - What are the benefits?