Webmail, as the name would suggest, is a website which offers users the ability to write, read, and edit electronic mail. Before webmail was introduced by companies such as Yahoo!, a standalone program was needed to access email, called an email client, Eudora and Thunderbird are two such examples of an email client.

One of the purposes of webmail is for easier access to email. The drawback to an email client is that it needs to be installed onto a computer, whereas webmail can be accessed by any computer with Internet access and a browser installed. This provides increased accessibility, because a user can use webmail to access email from an increased amount of potential computers.

The World Wide Web was only an idea in 1989, so it's obvious that webmail was created after this date. It's generally accepted that a number of people began the process of developing webmail at the same time, from 1994 to 1995. It was soon after that date that Hotmail began developing it's own free webmail service, which was eventually purchased by Microsoft in 1997.

Commercial webmail services have been launched by countless online companies, and are usually offered by most Internet Service Providers. Some of the most successful stand alone webmail services include Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo Mail. Gmail (Google Mail) altered the landscape of webmail by offering a storage capacity that was higher than webmail with a monthly fee. This made paid for webmail commerical redundant, and has forced webmail companies to think of other ways to monatize their service, such as targeted advertising.

Webmail and email clients are not always compatible when the POP3 mail protocol is used, whereas there is no such compatibility issues with the popular IMAP4 mail protocol. There is no standard protocol for how email content is rendered, therefore it differs on each webmail service.