RocketMail
More info
- Creator
- Four11 Corporation
- Released
- 1997
- Type
- Webmail
- Successor
- Yahoo Mail
One of the very first webmail services, in 1997; Yahoo bought it and turned it into Yahoo Mail.
RocketMail launched in 1997 from Four11 Corporation, the same company that ran an early online directory of email addresses. The pitch was the same as Hotmail's the year before: free email you reach in any browser, with no account at an internet provider required. In 1997 that was a new and faintly unsettling idea.
Yahoo acquired Four11 in October that year and built Yahoo Mail directly on top of RocketMail. The rocketmail.com domain survived for years as an alias you could pick instead of yahoo.com.