2012-05-12T19:53:00.001-07:00

In the early days of the web, in 1994 and 1995, several people were working on enabling email to be accessed on a web browser. In Europe, Soren Vejrum and Luca Manunza released their "WWW Mail" and "WebMail" applications, whereas in the United States, Matt Mankins wrote "Webex". Each of these early applications were perl scripts that included the full source code available for download. Also in 1994, Bill Fitler, while at Lotus cc:Mail in Mountain View, California, began working on an implementation of web-based email as a CGI program written in C on Windows NT, and demonstrated it publicly at Lotusphere in January 1995.Soren Vejrum's "WWW Mail" was written when he was studying and working at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark, and was released on February 28, 1995.Luca Manuza's WebMail was written while he was working at CRS4, in Sardinia, with the first source release on March 30, 1995. In the United States, Matt Mankins, under the supervision of Dr. Burt Rosenberg at the University of Miami released his "Webex" application source code in a post to comp.mail.misc on August 8, 1995,although it had been use as the primary email application at the School of Architecture where Mankins worked for some months prior. Meanwhile, Bill Fitler's webmail implementation was further developed as a commercial product which Lotus announced and released in the fall of 1995 as cc:Mail for the World Wide Web 1.0, thereby providing an alternative means of accessing a cc:Mail message store (the usual means being a cc:Mail desktop application that operated either via dialup or within the confines of a local area network). Early commercialization of webmail was also achieved when "Webex"—with no relation to the web conferencing company—began to be sold by Mankins' company, "DotShop, Inc." at the end of 1995. Within "DotShop", "Webex" changed its name to "EMUmail", which would be sold to companies like UPS, and Rackspace until its sale to Accurev in 2001.