

Hotmail/Windows Live Mail/Live Mail/ all essentially refer to the same underlying service but eternally being revamped to look new. And they keep changing, Gmail has periodic and irritating makeovers and IMHO an abysmal UI. Four different sets of rules and procedures you have to learn. Each with its own particular layout and tools. If I use webmail, that's four different websites I have to visit. Say I have, for whatever reasons, email accounts with yahoo, gmail, hotmail and my ISP.

Doing email via a website is usually called "webmail".

We who use it usually do so because we don't like using a website to do email. It talks to one or more email servers and gets your messages from them.
