Yahoo announces the acquisition of Four11 for 96 million dollars.
Four11 is the creator of the "Rocketmail" email service which was launched in March 1997.
At that time, Hotmail and Mirabilis were looking for a buyer, Yahoo was the first to be interested in both offers, however Yahoo could not buy either of them due to their high price.
In the end it was Microsoft who bought Hotmail and AOL bought Mirabilis.
At that time, email was one of the most important features of a web company as it meant more regular visits from users to their site and with the acquisition of Rocketmail, Yahoo transformed it into Yahoo mail which saved a few months as if Yahoo itself had created its own mail platform, it would have taken a few months which meant that many users could decide to do it on other competing sites.
Currently, Yahoo mail, is the third email service with the largest number of users worldwide behind Gmail and Outlook.
Sources:
Helí sulbaran
