Yahoo Mail is a free e-mail service sponsored by Yahoo. Launching in the mid-1990's, Yahoo mail has grown to be the #1 e-mail provider on the Internet today. It paved the way for other websites to start up their own e-mail websites.

With competition from other e-mail provider giants such as Gmail and Hotmail, Yahoo Mail was the first to offer unlimited storage for free towards its users. The new Yahoo mail was also launched to help user accounts look more like an e-mail client. Despite all of this, Yahoo mail still does not offer any POP3 or IMAP settings to transfer ones e-mail to another account, which Gmail currently offers.http://www.timeatlas.com/useful_utilities/free/use_your_email_app_with_yahoo_mail

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. This included Hotmail, which was originally launched on MSN in 1995. In order to stay competitive, Yahoo tried to buy Hotmail, but they were purchased by Microsoft instead in 1997.http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-206039.html On April 1, 2004, Gmail officially launched giving users 1GB of storage. This caused Yahoo Mail to begin increasing its amount of permanent storage. Eventually, 2007, Yahoo Mail opted to offer its users free unlimited storage.http://techcrunch.com/2007/03/27/yahoo-mail-announces-unlimited-storage/ Today, Yahoo Mail remains the largest e-mail website in the world, with over 250 million users.http://www.email-marketing-reports.com/metrics/email-statistics.htm

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. New features also allow users to have more space for attachments as well as more folders to sort their inbox. The website has agreements with major photo and video websites to provide easier access to a user's pictures and videos.http://overview.mail.yahoo.com/apps While all of these features are included within the new Yahoo mail, users can switch back to the old interface as well.http://advision.webevents.yahoo.com/mailbeta/features.html

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.