in 1997 when very few people used email as the main form of communicating with their friends, family, and co-workers, a little company in phoenix, arizona was working on an amazing email program. the company's fearless leader - reza - designed the architecture of world's most powerful email system. not only did gotmail provide a completely free email system, it also provided online calendars, notepads, virtual storage (similar to x-drive), web-based bookmarking and password storage, and many other features. in fact, looking back gotmail.com was very possibly the world's first (and again way before its time) social network. what myspace.com provides today, gotmail.com provided nearly a decade ago. times have changed, it's 1999 all over again...and this time it's here to stay. the money is flowing and many web ventures are being funded.

gotmail.com was taken offline in mid-october 2002. at the time over 700 people a day were signing up for a free email address at gotmail.com and the site was receiving about 20,000 unique visitors per day. today the desirable gotmail.com domain is listed for sale for a minimum offer of $750,000.