Yahoo Mail turns 10

By Aditya Mhatre at 9 October, 2007, 10:19 am

It was this day in 1997 that Yahoo mail launched with a gi-normous storage space of 3MB per account. Yahoo mail doesn’t do just email anymore. It sends SMS, has an RSS reader built in a whole lot of other things. To mark this day Yahoo released a brief history of its mail service.

And for those who are wondering when did Hotmail launch? the answer is in 1996. Here is a 2006 press release about its 10 years of service!

October 1997: Yahoo! Mail launches following our acquisition of Four 11, creators of RocketMail.
December 1998: The movie You’ve Got Mail debuts.
March 1999: CNN’s Ten Commandments of Email cites that Americans sent 2.1 billion emails daily (vs. 196 billion per day this year).
December 1999: Yahoo! Mail launches Spamguard to detect spam and banish it to a separate folder.
January 2000: Web mail survives Y2K.
November 2001: Pope John Paul II is the first pontiff to send an email apology.
March 2002: It’s reported internationally that email outpaces snail mail as the preferred method for residential communication.
December 2003: Congress passes the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 to regulate the sending of commercial email.
July 2004: Yahoo! acquires Oddpost, bringing AJAX to Yahoo! and inspiring Yahoo! Mail’s most significant upgrade ever.
June 2005: Broadway’s Spamalot wins Tony Award for Best Musical.
March 2006: IDG study shows that Americans sent 11.8 billion photos via email in 2005, compared with 2.6 billion in 2000. By 2009, this number is projected to 25.7 billion images.
March 2007: Yahoo! Mail announces free, unlimited e-mail storage for all users.
August 2007: According to Comscore , the worldwide Web mail market counts approximately 543 million people, with Yahoo! Mail alone representing 255 million.