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."
Nokia Mail and Nokia Chat
Nokia Mail and Nokia Chat (earlier "Nokia Email" and "Ovi Mail") were services developed by Microsoft Mobile and earlier by Nokia for its mobile phones. The service operated as a centralized, hosted service that acted as a proxy between the Messaging client and the user's e-mail server. The phone did not connect directly to the e-mail server, but instead sent e-mail credentials to Nokia's servers. On 13 August 2008 Nokia launched a beta release of "Nokia Email service", a push e-mail service, later incorporated into Nokia Messaging. The original version of Nokia Messaging was launched in 2008 with the Nokia N97 line of smartphones and was exclusive to Finland, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Singapore, Australia and Venezuela before being expanded to other countries and was exclusive to Symbian handsets, Series 40 support was announced for 2009. The first public version of Nokia Messaging supports Windows Live Hotmail accounts, Yahoo! accounts, and Google accounts and was available in 12 languages.