Hotmail is a free "webmail" e-mail service, which is accessible via a web browser.

History

Hotmail , founded by Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia in 1995, was commercially launched on July 4, 1996, Independence Day in the United States, symbolically representing freedom from ISPs. Jack Smith first had the idea of accessing e-mail via the web from a computer anywhere in the world, originally as an impetus from getting by corporate firewalls blocking regular mail services. When Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of names ending in "-mail" and finally settled on Hotmail because it included the letters "HTML" - the markup language used to write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casing (camel case).

Hotmail was originally backed by the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. By December 1997, Hotmail reported more than 8.5 million subscribers [1] and was sold later that month to Microsoft, which rebranded it under its MSN umbrella.

By February 1999, it reported more than 30 million active members. [2] Hotmail serves e-mail accounts in many countries, supporting 17 languages, and is still one of the largest webmail provider as of July 2005 with 35.5% world market share according to comScore Media Metrix data. [3].

On December 24, 1999, the Hotmail service became inaccessible for two to three days when the domain name registration lapsed for passport.com, which Hotmail uses for user authentication. The registration fee for the expired domain was paid by a Hotmail user Michael Chaney on December 25. [4]

Despite being a wholly owned Microsoft property, the Hotmail development and operations teams are based in Mountain View, CA at the company's Silicon Valley Campus. As of Sept 2005, the division appears to be growing based on the number of recently opened positions according to Microsoft's Bay Area job postings [5].

Storage

Hotmail offers 250 MB of free e-mail storage which was previously 2 MB. The substantial increase was introduced shortly after Google's Gmail began. Some accounts are still limited to 2 MB despite promises to increase. There is a 10 MB attachment limit. It has been reported that MSN may soon offer 2 GB of free e-mail storage to members [6]. At present, customers can pay a fee to receive 2 GB of storage and 20 MB attachments.

POP3 access

While Hotmail does not have POP3 email access, it is possible to check one's own e-mail using Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express on PC and Microsoft Entourage on Mac, using the WebDAV protocol. While this service was free for a number of years, Microsoft announced on September 27, 2004 that they were making it a subscription-only service for new users immediately and existing users from April 2005. However, existing users are still able to access their Hotmail accounts via this protocol for free as of August 2005. It is unclear when Microsoft will revoke this feature as many users rely on this function. Users can get around this restriction however, by using software that simulates a POP server to which the e-mail application connects. FreePOPs ¹, is an example of a free software application that allows email clients access to webmail services through POP3.

Hotmail domains

On November 18, 2004, Hotmail began offering email addresses from several country-specific domains. Users can now register a @hotmail.co.uk address, which gives users greater choice in their e-mail address, as many @hotmail.com addresses are already taken. MSN had run auctions on eBay for popular addresses when the service launched and the money was donated to the NSPCC charity.

MSN offers a premium service entitled "Personal Address". Hotmail supports this by hosting email accounts at customer specified domain names such as MyName@MyDomain.com.

Miscellaneous

At the Hotmail main screen, users can access integrated MSN services such as Calendar and Contacts (the latter being shared with MSN Messenger).

In December 2004, Microsoft started its new blogging service called MSN Spaces and integrated it with MSN Messenger and MSN Hotmail.

MSN now offers a service named Microsoft Office Outlook Live. This will offer the latest version of Outlook and updates for a charge. MSN Hotmail users will then be able to use their email accounts (including Hotmail) on it.

If a free MSN Hotmail account is not accessed in a 30-day period, then it is temporarily deactivated (all messages deleted, although not the address book). The underlying Passport account, which is tied to the e-mail address, is not released back in to the address pool for 90 days. This allows the current owner to re-activate the e-mail portion of the account and keep the address before new users can register for it. MSN Premium / MSN Hotmail Plus customers (pay service) are exempt from the expiration policy.

Until May 10, 2005 the special feature of including "." in the email address (eg. user.name@hotmail.com) wasn't available, but with growing competition from other free email providers like Gmail and Yahoo! Mail, this feature was made available to users.

There are outdated reports, circa 1998, stating that Hotmail was last known to use Solaris and BSD—notably non-Microsoft products—for its mission-critical components [7]. More recent data show that in 2001 the web services was rewritten to run on the NT based IIS platform, realizing a near doubling of the throughput utilizing the same server hardware that previously hosted Apache on top of BSD. By 2002, the incoming SMTP services were transitioned off of the Solaris platform onto NT, significantly increasing the mail receiving capacity while running on less hardware. As of the beginning of 2005, Hotmail has ceased all development on non-Microsoft components and is now executing on plans to finalize the transition off of the last few remaining Solaris based services.

As of new reports on 30th August 2005, Hotmail has the largest number of free web-mail users with 221 million users, or 35.5 percent of the world, according to comScore Media Metrix data.

Hotmail's full features are not available on browsers other than Microsoft Internet Explorer. These features include a customised right-click context menu to make Hotmail function similar to Microsoft's Outlook mail clients.

Criticism

Hotmail has supposedly engaged in foul business tactics by blocking invites for Gmail, the popular mail service from Google. [8]

See also

• AIM Mail
• Gmail
• Webmail
• Yahoo! Mail
• MSN Messenger
• Windows Live Mail
• Windows Live Messenger
• ZooBuh

External links

• Hotmail.com
• MSN.com
• MSN Messenger
• Microsoft to charge for Hotmail-Outlook link - article on ITworld.com announcing end of free webdav service
• Blog by Lead Program Manager, Hotmail
• "Kahuna", new Hotmail product (video)

Notes

Note 1: FreePOPs website (for more information about program, program download) FreePOPs