Google Mail or Yahoo Mail

Yahoo! Mail (shortened to Y! Mail) is a free web mail service provided by Yahoo!. It was inaugurated in 1997. According to comScore, Yahoo! Mail is the second largest web-based e-mail service with 273.1 million users as of November 2010.

Currently, Yahoo! offers two versions of Yahoo! Mail: an Outlook-like Ajax interface based upon code the company acquired from Oddpost in 2004, as well as the traditional full-page-scroll "Yahoo! Mail Classic," which continues the availability of the simpler 1997-2006 interface for the brand's considerable installed base of users. In early 2008, Yahoo! started offering unlimited mail storage to its users, in response to heated competition in the free-web mail market segment.

On June 27, 2009, Yahoo! Messenger was integrated with Yahoo! Mail Beta. This means that Messenger and Mail are together in one place, allowing users to connect instantly with others who are online, switch between e-mail and chat, with no download or setup required. This new feature is now available for Mail Classic.

Gmail is a free, advertising-supported webmail, POP3, and IMAP service provided by Google. Gmail was launched as an invitation-only beta release on April 1, 2004 and it became available to the general public on February 7, 2007, though still in beta status at that time. The service was upgraded from beta status on July 7, 2009, along with the rest of the Google Apps suite. As of November 2010, it had 193.3 million users monthly.

With an initial storage capacity offer of 1 GB per user, Gmail significantly increased the webmail standard for free storage from the 2 to 4 MB its competitors such as Hotmail offered at that time. Gmail has a search-oriented interface and a "conversation view" similar to an Internet forum. Gmail is noted by web developers for its pioneering use of AJAX Gmail runs on Google GFE/2.0 on Linux.