Yahoo! Mail
Yahoo! made a deal with the online communications company Four11 for co-branded white pages. Marvin Gavin, who worked at Four11 as the Director of International Business Development, said "We always had a bias about being acquired by Yahoo. They were more entrepreneurial than Microsoft. We had a great cultural fit – it made a lot of sense." In the end, Yahoo! acquired Four11 for $96 million. The purpose behind acquiring Four11 was the company's RocketMail webmail service, which launched in 1997. Yahoo! announced the acquisition on October 8, 1997, close to the time that Yahoo! Mail was launched. Yahoo! chose acquisition rather than internal platform development, because, as Healy said, "Hotmail was growing at thousands and thousands users per week. We did an analysis. For us to build, it would have taken four to six months, and by then, so many users would have taken an email account. The speed of the market was critical."
Yahoo! Mail
In April 2011, Yahoo! Mail began rejecting spam reports, which involved sending a copy of the spam with full headers by email to Yahoo's abuse department, offering the use of a form instead. However, the requirement to use a form is prohibited by several Internet RFCs, and the availability of abuse at example.com (in this case abuse at yahoo.com) is required by the Invariants clause of RFC 2142, because the domain has a mail server and an MX record. Yahoo's claim was that its "standard" was better than the Internet standards referred to. This is the only working form through which users can report spam or misuse of the Yahoo! email service.