Gmail is a free, advertising-supported email service developed by Google.

Users can access Gmail on the web and through the mobile apps for Android and iOS, as well as through third-party programs that synchronize email content through POP or IMAP protocols.

Gmail started as a limited beta release on April 1, 2004.

It exited beta status on July 7, 2009.

Mail merge is a process to create personalized letters and pre-addressed envelopes or mailing labels for mass mailings from a form letter.

The feature is usually employed on a word processing document which contains fixed text (which is the same in each output document) and variables (which act as placeholders that are replaced by text from the data source).

The feature dates back to early word processors on personal computers, circa 1980.

WordStar was perhaps the earliest to provide this, originally via an ancillary program called MailMerge.

WordPerfect also offered this capacity for CP/M and MS-DOS systems, and Microsoft Word added it later on.

Electronic mail, or email, is a method of exchanging digital messages between people using digital devices such as computers and mobile phones.

Email first entered substantial use in the 1960s and by the mid-1970s had taken the form now recognized as email.

Email operates across computer networks, which today is primarily the Internet.

Some early email systems required the author and the recipient to both be online at the same time, in common with instant messaging.

Today's email systems are based on a store-and-forward model.

Email servers accept, forward, deliver, and store messages.

Neither the users nor their computers are required to be online simultaneously; they need to connect only briefly, typically to a mail server or a webmail interface, for as long as it takes to send or receive messages.

Outlook.com is a web-based suite of webmail, contacts, tasks, and calendaring services from Microsoft.

One of the world's first webmail services, it was founded in 1996 as Hotmail (stylized as HoTMaiL) by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith in Mountain View, California, and headquartered in Sunnyvale.

Microsoft acquired Hotmail in 1997 for an estimated $400 million and launched it as MSN Hotmail, later rebranded to Windows Live Hotmail as part of the Windows Live suite of products.

Microsoft released the final version of Hotmail in October 2011, available in 36 languages.

It was replaced by Outlook.com in 2013.