Talk:Webmail

Question on GB v MB
Regarding the changes made on 23:25, 20 September 2005 by 61.11.38.6, is it really advantageous to change all gigabyte values to megabyte values? It seems more concise and usable to keep the values in gigabytes. Any input would be appreciated.
 * KHenriksson 03:30, 21 September 2005 (UTC)
 * I'd say lets revert to what it was, for from now on list the space as the providers list it, like Gmail in MB and others in GB - Ablaze 12:52, 21 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Using the same notation as the providers seems like a good idea, but will probably lead to inconsistent notation. I think if we do this we should at least put a more consistent notation in parentheses i.e. 2048 MB (2 GB). - KHenriksson 05:20, 26 September 2005 (UTC)

Some people might not understand the MB form. Sadiq815 14:52, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

Webmail Links
Why were the links erased from the main article? I can't see any good reason form External links why they should have been removed. - KHenriksson 05:35, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

Advantages of webmail
Under this section and the one after it (features of webmail), there is a lot of info commented out. Can someone with more technical knowledge than me either pull them out entirely and archive them here -- with the explanations of why -- or restore them if the comment are in fact valid? Thanks. Janet13 18:50, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

I commented out some features not germane to webmail services some time ago during a rewrite of those sections and annotated them to encourage editors to think about the non-features to prevent them from creeping back in. The sections are reproduced below; excised bits are marked blue. Pilatus 19:50, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

Advantages of webmail services

 * Messages do not have to be downloaded.
 * Not a unique feature of webmail
 * Many services allow anonymous sign-ups.
 * Moved to "Other features
 * No need to change eMail addresses should you switch ISP's.
 * This is true for popboxes, too, and not a feature of webmail -->
 * Assuming the webmail user logs out of the service and the site's pages are not cached locally (most are encrypted anyway), email messages are not stored locally on the user's hard drive, thus are not usually at risk of data retrieval should the hard drive be searched.
 * Not germane to webmail services; accessing a POP3 server through a telnet connection leaves no traces on the local harddisk either
 * Web browsers are always available at internet cafes; terminal emulations and email clients typically are not

Disadvantages of webmail services

 * If the provider goes down, you no longer have your mails. Although this doesn't happen usually, it's quite possible.
 * This is trivial
 * The user must stay online to read and write more than one email. They cannot easily edit mails they are working on offline (except by cutting and pasting the text).
 * Commercial webmail services often offer only limited email storage space and either display advertisements during use or append them to mails sent. Unlike with a local client, the user cannot keep the messages on their local hard drive.
 * Most emails are usually short, plain text messages of less than 2 kB, but using webmail the original email is wrapped in the website's HTML, which can be 40 kB or more. Obviously this brings a significant decrease in speed of use, especially on a slow network connection.


 * Webmail usually has speed and functionality limitations relative to other email clients, partly due to limited capabilities of HTML (web pages). For example, when messages are tagged for deletion in the index, these tags are usually lost when one reads a message. That means you can't read a message that you suspect you may wish to delete (to help decide) without deleting already tagged messages or having to re-tag them. Thus it is more awkward to delete multiple messages.'' I don't understand the example much. Can anybody explain more clearly or show me what webmail has this disadvantage? Thanks.Vinhtantran 11:08, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Other features of webmail

 * The origin of mail from them cannot be traced without help from the owners of the service.
 * This is true of normal e-mail, too.
 * Webmail accounts can be set up with minimum technical competence and provide independence from one's current ISP as well as a degree of anonymity.

GMAIL, Best Webmail?
"Despite causing quite a stir of publicity, Gmail, the best free webmail service recently introduced by Google, only has 4%, mainly due to its invite only policy." Just running it through you guys. Can you claim that? -- Abid Ahmed 19:02, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

I've removed the word 'best', such a statement doesn't really belong in Wikipedia Timffl 22:45, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

MyPersonalEmail.com
Notable or not? --Lakhim 23:02, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

Advertisement
"On March 21, 2005, Streamload announced the launch of xStreamMail. The first e-mail enhancement system specifically designed for sending and sharing collections of full-quality videos and photos, xStreamMail users are given 10 GB of free e-mail storage and file attachment limits to paying subscribers of 50 terabytes per e-mail." [Emphasis mine.] Since I don't know anything about them, I can't really delete it....  If anyone does, please get rid of it. 141.149.206.197 21:35, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

info on email "relays"
how about some info on what could be called "email relays" like HOTPOP ?

since they redirect email to whatever REAL email adress you currently use, by needing only a single user@hotpop.com styled email adress...

Comes in handy for people constantly changing webmail service. You give a single email adress to friends, and any change of webmail service doesnt affect contacts.

I think this should be discussed as well, even if such services do not behave like regular webmail sites. Whats your say in that ?

Most popular
In April 2006, Google were only laying claim to fourth most popular: see http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/04/gmail-fourth-most-popular-webmail.html. This article has them in the top 3; and without citation. Unfortunately, Google do not provide their data that puts them at #4.
 * Cited an article which collates various sources of data to put Yahoo and Hotmal top, but Gmail fourth (at best) and considerably less important from a numbers point of view. Golf fan 15:28, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

"Webmail client" vs. "webmail service"
I think this article is very confused as it doesn't make the distiction between a "webmail client" - a web application that is an email client running on a web server with interface on a web browser - and the services offered by "webmail services" - some of them are specific capabilities of the webmail client but others, such as POP3 access and email forwarding, have nothing to do with the "webmail client" other than being offered by services that are more famous for offering a webmail client for accessing the email store than for other features they provide. Many of the "webmail services" are email hosts that provide lots of email functionality that is accessible to users without using the web application they also offer.

So "webmail" is used in two quite different ways: one is a general purpose email service that is not tied to an ISP's internet access service. The other is an email client implemented as a web application. Most webmail services are offering the use of a webmail client and most well known webmail clients are tied to a particular webmail service, but there are exceptions, and the two concepts are not the same. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Hadaso (talk • contribs) 08:22, 19 January 2007 (UTC).

webmail account user is always traceable?
"The ability to access it anywhere means it is harder (though by no means difficult) to trace the individual who uses an account than if they used a connection associated with their home address." Is this necessarily true? What about if I set up the webmail account in an anonymous internet cafe and only ever used the webmail account from anonymous internet cafes.139.133.7.37 19:53, 10 May 2007 (UTC)21:13, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
 * CCTV monitoring in the facility itself, not to mention the webcams of the other machines. Maybe if you're really ordinary looking you can hope to blend, but if you have any noticeable physical characteristics, forget it. Zaphraud (talk) 01:22, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

the fourth paragraph
the fourth paragraph of this article says too much as should a introductry paragraph, (i.e., paragraphs before the first heading, I do not remember what we call it on wikipedia). Is it not biased towards Yahoo Mail? Sumitkumar kataria (talk) 14:01, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
 * I agree, the paragraph read like an advertisement for Yahoo mail. It also lacked citations.  I looked at the article about Yahoo mail, and it appeared to cover most of the material in the paragraph, so I deleted the paragraph. Zodon (talk) 19:25, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

Which webmail has the largest number of accounts?
Is there any reliable data about this? Sumitkumar kataria (talk) 15:00, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
 * Nope, there is not. Even facebook, with its intrusive monitoring, experienced tens of millions of fake user accounts. 80M I believe it was, confirmed fake later on... and email accounts remain at least as lucrative to spammers as social media ever has been... and after all that, you'd still be stuck trusting the company who was reporting its own figures, with plenty of financial incentive to lie. There are some good guesses out there, but they are only guesses. Zaphraud (talk) 01:18, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Misspelling in Title
Since “email” is a misspelling (It should be hyphenated as “e-mail” because the name of the letter E is said as part of the word instead of the letter being pronounced phonetically as part of the word.) and it is in the title of this page, what can I do to correct the misspelling and keep the links working which direct to this page? Greta Hoostal (talk) 03:15, 18 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Hi. This is not a misspelling. Both spellings are valid, according to various dictionaries (see the discussion at E-mail). In this circumstance, the wikipedia policy is to maintain existing variety on a per-page basis (see WP:ENGVAR). Sam (talk) 07:31, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

Webmail client vs. Webmail provider - there's a need for a separate article
I've rewritten the heading of the article to refer mainly to "webmail client" as opposed to "webmail provider" as almost all the content of the article (in particular the "history" section) covered only this aspect of the term "webmail". Also the capabilities of modern web applications make much of the comparison with desktop email clients quite obsolete.

I copy the little bit of "history" of webmail providers that was in the article here:


 * In 1997, before its acquisition by Microsoft, Hotmail (now Windows Live Hotmail) introduced its dedicated email website, which became one of the first popular dedicated email websites. Following Hotmail's success, Google introduced Gmail in 2004 with new features such as JavaScript menus, text-based ads, and bigger storage, sparking a period of rapid development in webmail.

I think this is very partial information, not giving a true picture of the history of webmail providers, and is also quite poorly written. On the other hand I think that the history of webmail providers deserves an article of its own. Over the past 15 years they effected one of the most important changes in the way humans communicate and had tremendous social effects. However I don't know of any source that summarizes this history. It seems that there's a need for some major research on this before a Wikipedia article can be written about it. It's certainly not "Once there was Hotmail (and Yahoo Mail). Then came Gmail. That's it". Gmail did not appear out of the blue. There was a lot going on between 1997 and 2004, and although Gmail introduced several big innovations in April 2004 (and changed the rules of the game with regard to mailbox quotas), most of what it offered then and later that was not offered by Hotmail and Yahoo was already available from some smaller providers (free or paid) before Gmail offered it.

So I think there's a need for a separate article on webmail providers that would have separate historical sections: one for the major trends: the way the big services developed and the social impact of introduction of new ways to communicate to their masses of users, and the appearing and then disappearing of many small free and paid webmail providers before Gmail came. Another history section for the more detailed technical development: who introduced what features and when.

Hadaso (talk) 21:04, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

I agree with the above proposal, that there should be a history of webmail services somewhere. But should it be a separate article, or in here? As noted, we don't want to confuse the two (client app vs. webmail services), so it should be two divisions within this article. Note that a services-specific "Privacy concerns" section was added, so the intro is already wrong (where it says the article is client-specific). Note also that articles "Hotmail", "Rocketmail", etc., already link to this page. So it may be necessary to put the services-specific info here. Any counter-proposals? -- HLachman (talk) 18:48, 24 May 2012 (UTC)

Another idea: Split this topic into two separate articles, "Webmail application software" and "Webmail service provider". Then, have a disambiguation page just called "Webmail" (kind of like the way "Microsoft Exchange" disambiguates between two related articles). Good idea or no? If there is no discussion, I might just go ahead and try doing that. -- HLachman (talk) 07:41, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

webmail providers
Not enough information, can someone give more? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 46.10.229.1 (talk) 23:05, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

"Practically every webmail provider offers email access using a webmail client …"
A webmail provider not offering email access using a webmail client isn't a webmail provider, isn't it? --92.107.180.131 (talk) 18:44, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

I agree! Why is the word "Practically" in this sentence? By definition a webmail provides email access via a webmail client. Therefore, the word "practically" should be removed. Fbax (talk) 17:25, 25 August 2014 (UTC)


 * I've removed the entire phrase as a tautology. – Smyth\talk 17:56, 21 February 2016 (UTC)

NPOV issue: severe US favoritism
I am not suggesting that Wikipedia attempt to produce a list of unmonitored webmail, as this is impractical, but merely to suggest that if this article is to remain NPOV, some webmail providers hosted in any of several other English-speaking nations, such as India, Canada, Australia, or the United Kingdom ought to be listed in the initial paragraph.

The fact that every webmail provider currently listed in the initial paragraph is operated by a company actually known to be in collusion with the NSA only underscores the severe US bias of this article.

Surely the nice blokes at ECHELON have some suggestions for UK-based email sites on their favourite-reading lists that they could suggest, right? Zaphraud (talk) 01:12, 10 July 2013