Webmail

Early implementations

The first Web Mail implementation was developed at CERN in 1993 by Phillip Hallam-Baker^[3] as a test of the HTTP protocol stack. This led to the discovery that the specification of the POST method was faulty, requiring the introduction of the Content-Length header. The CERN-PTG daemon was released later that year but was not developed further. In the early days of the web, in 1994 and 1995, several people were working on enabling email to be accessed via a web browser. In Europe, there were three implementations, Søren Vejrum's "WWW Mail",^[4] Luca Manunza's "WebMail",^[5][6] and Remy Wetzels' "WebMail",^[7] whereas in the United States, Matt Mankins wrote "Webex".^[8] Three of these early applications were perl scripts that included the full source code available for download. Remy Wetzels' version was a CGI program written in C on Unix.

In 1994, Bill Fitler, while at Lotus cc:Mail in Mountain View, California, began working on an implementation of web-based email as a CGI program written in C on Windows NT, and demonstrated it publicly at Lotusphere on January 24, 1995.^{[9][10][11][12]}

Søren Vejrum's "WWW Mail" was written when he was studying and working at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark, and was released on February 28, 1995.^[13] Luca Manunza's "WebMail" was written while he was working at CRS4 in Sardinia, with the first source release on March 30, 1995.^[14] Remy Wetzels' "WebMail" was written while he was studying at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands for the DSE^[15][16] and was released early January, 1995. In the United States, Matt Mankins, under the supervision of Dr. Burt Rosenberg at the University of Miami,^[17] released his "Webex" application source code in a post to comp.mail.misc on August 8, 1995,^[8] although it had been in use as the primary email application at the School of Architecture where Mankins worked for some months prior.

Meanwhile, Bill Fitler's webmail implementation was further developed as a commercial product which Lotus announced and released in the fall of 1995 as cc:Mail for the World Wide Web 1.0, thereby providing an alternative means of accessing a cc:Mail message store (the usual means being a cc:Mail desktop application that operated either via dialup or within the confines of a local area network).^{[18][19][20][21]}

Early commercialization of webmail was also achieved when "Webex"—with no relation to the web conferencing company—began to be sold by Mankins' company, DotShop, Inc., at the end of 1995. Within DotShop, "Webex" changed its name to "EMUmail", which would be sold to companies like UPS and Rackspace until its sale to Accurev in 2001.^[22] EMUmail was one of the first applications to feature a free version that included embedded advertising as well as a licensed version that did not.

Hotmail and Four11's RocketMail both launched in 1996^[23] as free services and immediately became very popular.

Widespread deployment

As the 1990s progressed, and into the 2000s, it became more common for the general public to have access to webmail because:

• many Internet service providers (such as EarthLink) and web hosting providers (such as Verio) began bundling webmail into their service offerings (often in parallel with POP/SMTP services);
• many other enterprises (such as universities and large corporations) also started offering webmail as a way for their user communities to access their email (either locally managed or outsourced);
• webmail service providers (such as Hotmail and RocketMail) emerged in 1996 as a free service to the general public, and rapidly gained in popularity.

In some cases, webmail application software is developed in-house by the organizations running and managing the application, and in some cases it is obtained from software companies that develop and sell such applications, usually as part of an integrated mail server package (an early example being Netscape Messaging Server^[24][25]). The market for webmail application software has continued into the 2010s.