Yahoo! Mail
Yahoo! Mail is an email service launched in 1997 through the American parent company Yahoo!. Yahoo Mail provides four different email plans: three for personal use (Basic, Plus, and Ad Free) and another for businesses. By December 2011, Yahoo! Mail had 281 million users, making it the third largest web-based email service in the world. Since 2015 its webmail client also supports managing non-Yahoo e-mail accounts.
History of Gmail
At the time when Gmail was being developed, existing email services such as Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail featured extremely slow interfaces that were written in plain HTML, with almost every action by the user requiring the server to reload the entire webpage. Buchheit attempted to work around the limitations of HTML by using the highly interactive JavaScript code, an approach that ultimately came to be called AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML).