Define RocketMail

Background

Technology company Four11 Corp. created RocketMail in 1997, and it quickly became the company’s flagship brand due to its status as one of the first products of its kind. For the next decade, RocketMail's chief competitor was Windows Live Hotmail – also known as simply Hotmail – which debuted in 1996 as the world’s first Web-based mail service and was later acquired by Microsoft Corp.

In the early 2000s, RocketMail and Hotmail were eclipsed by Yahoo Mail, which was founded in the same year as RocketMail. According to technology industry publications such as CNET, Yahoo was the world’s leading email service provider. With Hotmail in a close second place and the quick ascendancy of Google’s Gmail, Yahoo was determined to retain its position. So, in 2007, Yahoo acquired RocketMail from Four11 for about $92 million.

According to John Kremer, who was vice president of Yahoo Mail at the time of the RocketMail acquisition, users needed an alternative option to the Yahoo address. It was becoming increasingly difficult for potential Yahoo users to set up easy-to-remember email handles, since Yahoo’s popularity meant increased likelihood of conflict with the ones taken by older users. The RocketMail brand made its debut as part of Yahoo on June 19, 2008, allowing users to choose “@rocketmail.com” instead of the default “@yahoo.com” for email addresses.

RocketMail is one of the three domain names that Yahoo offers for its free email service. The third option is Ymail, or “@ymail.com,” which Yahoo introduced with RocketMail in 2008 to directly compete with Gmail. The strategy paid off – at least for the rest of the 2000s, as Yahoo remained the world’s largest email provider. However, RocketMail itself is not as popular as the default Yahoo address, let alone the ones from Hotmail and Gmail.