Web mail is an Internet application that allows you to read and compose e-mail using a web browser. Prior to web mail, it was necessary to install an e-mail client such as Eudora or Microsoft Outlook to send and received e-mail. This restricted a person from accessing e-mail if he was traveling or was away from the computer on which the e-mail client was installed. Web mail made it easy for anyone to open an e-mail account and access it from any computer, from any part of the world.

The first web mail service was Hotmail. It was created in 1995 by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith. Hotmail quickly became popular and was later acquired by Microsoft, who re-branded it as MSN Hotmail. Today web mail is offered for free by several Internet companies including Yahoo and Google. Most of these companies recover the cost through some sort of advertising. It is also offered by most ISPs to help their customers access their e-mails remotely.

To provide web mail access, a special software application known as web mail server is required. A web mail server acts as an interface between the web browser and e-mail server. Web mail software allows you to create your own web mail server, and is easily available. Some examples include open source software such as Squirrelmail and Horde IMP.

These web mail servers provide all the regular e-mail features such as ability to access e-mails using a web browser from any computer, composition of e-mails, deleting e-mails, creation of folders, trash folder, address book, spell check and anti-spam filtering.

Some commercial mail servers, including Microsoft Exchange, Kerio MailServer and Atmail, contain built-in webmail interfaces.

The disadvantages of web mail are that the e-mails are not stored on your local hard drive and you cannot access them if you are not connected to the Internet. It is also difficult to edit the e-mails offline unless you copy and paste the e-mails to a word processing application.

However, considering that the advantages clearly outnumber the disadvantages, free web mail servers can be of great help.