Email facilities

It should be appreciated that email is not part of a website.  An organisation almost always uses the same domain name for their site and their email but there the connection ends.  In fact, the development and use of email predates the development and use of email.

The program that runs email may (and often does) sit on the same server as the site but is quite separate from it.  It is usually a proprietary program that merely needs configuring.
Many hosting companies offer email as part of its package.  It’s usually at no extra charge (as a loss leader) and there won’t be any deduction for not using it.

Webmail (or Web-based e-mail) is an e-mail service intended to be primarily accessed via a web browser, as opposed to through a desktop e-mail client (such as Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla's Thunderbird, or Apple Inc.'s Mail). Very popular webmail providers include Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, and AOL.

A major advantage of webmail over application-based e-mail is that a user has the ability to access their inbox from any Internet-connected computer around the world. However, the need for Internet access is also a drawback, in that one cannot access old messages when not connected to the Internet.

In 1997, before its acquisition by Microsoft, Hotmail (now Windows Live Mail) introduced its service, which became one of the first popular web-based e-mail offerings. Following Hotmail's success, Google's introduction of Gmail in 2004 sparked a period of rapid development in webmail, due to Gmail's new features such as JavaScript menus, text-based ads, and bigger storage.