History of Yahoo!
On March 8, 1997, Yahoo! acquired online communications company Four11. Four11's webmail service, Rocketmail, became Yahoo! Mail. Yahoo! also acquired ClassicGames.com and turned it into Yahoo! Games. Yahoo! then acquired direct marketing company Yoyodyne Entertainment, Inc. on October 12, 1998. In January 1999, Yahoo! acquired web hosting provider GeoCities. Another company Yahoo! took over was eGroups, which became Yahoo! Groups in June 2000. On March 8, 1998, Yahoo! launched Yahoo! Pager, an instant messaging service that was renamed Yahoo! Messenger a year later.
History of Gmail
In January 2005, security experts discovered a critical flaw in the handling of Gmail messages that would allow hackers to easily access private emails from any Gmail user's account. This was posted with detailed information to popular technology site Slashdot at 9:23 a.m. PST on 12 January 2005. On 13 January 2005, developers at Gmail announced that they had fixed the problem and that the security flaw had been patched. Despite Gmail's status as a beta application, concerns were raised among some users who were using Gmail as their primary mail account. On 1 April 2005, exactly one year after the initial release, Gmail increased the mailbox size to 2 GB, advertising it as 2GB plus and introduced some other new features, including formatted editing which gave users the option of sending messages in HTML or plain text.