Hotmail
Hotmail's login page
Maintainer:	Microsoft
Genre:	E-mail, webmail
Website:	http://www.hotmail.com

Hotmail is a free "webmail" e-mail service, which is accessible via a web browser. Its competitors include AIM Mail, Gmail and Yahoo! Mail. Windows Live Mail is to replace Hotmail once it is complete. Image File history File links Msn_hotmail_frontpage_of. ... Software maintenance is one of the activities in software engineering, and is the process of enhancing and optimizing deployed software (software release), as well as remedying defects. ... Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT, SEHK: 4338) is an international computer technology corporation with 2005 global annual sales of close to $40 billion USD and about 64,000 employees in 85 countries and regions which develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products for computing devices. ... A software genre is a classification of software by its common function, type or topic. ... Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. ... Webmail is a class of web applications that allow users to read and write e-mail using a web browser, or in a more general sense, an e-mail account accessed through such an application. ... The front page of the English Wikipedia Website. ... Webmail is a class of web applications that allow users to read and write e-mail using a web browser, or in a more general sense, an e-mail account accessed through such an application. ... Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. ... It has been suggested that Comparison of web browsers be merged into this article or section. ... AIM Mail is a Web-based e-mail (Webmail) service from America Online (AOL). ... Gmail is a popular free webmail and POP e-mail service, currently in beta testing, from Google, Inc. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Windows Live Mail is a web-based e-mail service by Microsoft. ...

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 in order to get 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 the base of web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casing. Jack Smith, along with Sabeer Bhatia, founded the web-based free e-mail service Hotmail, in 1995. ... Sabeer Bhatia is a co-founder of Hotmail. ... July 4 is the 185th day of the year (186th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 180 days remaining. ... 1996 (MCMXCVI) was a leap year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year for the Eradication of Poverty. ... These fireworks over the Washington Monument are typical of Fourth of July celebrations In the United States, Independence Day, also called the Fourth of July, is a federal holiday celebrating the adoption of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. ... An Internet service provider (ISP, also called Internet access provider) is a business or organization that offers users access to the Internet and related services. ... A piece of HTML code with syntax highlighting In computing, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language designed for the creation of web pages with hypertext and other information to be displayed in a web browser. ... Majuscules or capital letters (in the Roman alphabet: A, B, C, ...) are one type of case in a writing system. ...

The Hotmail logo before it was rebranded under MSN.

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 for a reported $400m, after which it was rebranded under the MSN umbrella. Image File history File links Hotmail_classic_logo. ... Venture capital is a general term to describe financing for startup and early stage businesses as well as businesses in turn around situations. ... Draper Fisher Jurvetson is a venture capital firm based in Redwood City, California. ... Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT, SEHK: 4338) is an international computer technology corporation with 2005 global annual sales of close to $40 billion USD and about 64,000 employees in 85 countries and regions which develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products for computing devices. ... MSN (or The Microsoft Network) a collection of Internet services provided by Microsoft. ...

By February 1999, Hotmail 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 providers as of July 2005, with 35.5% world market share according to comScore Media Metrix data.

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 in Microsoft's Bay Area job postings [3]. Nickname: Motto: Official website: http://www. ... Official language(s) English Capital Sacramento Largest city Los Angeles Area  - Total   - Width   - Length   - % water  - Latitude  - Longitude Ranked 3rd 158,302 sq mi  410,000 km² 250 miles  402. ... A view of downtown San Jose, the self-proclaimed Capital of Silicon Valley. ...

Storage

Hotmail offers 250 MB of free e-mail storage (although there is a 10 MB attachment limit) for users in the US, Brazil, Canada, the UK, Spain and Australia; users in other countries may get a mailbox limit of 10 MB, which is anyway usually increased to 250 MB after a period of time. This substantial increase in mailbox size was introduced shortly after Google's Gmail debuted. MSN is expected to start offering 2 GB of free e-mail storage to members soon. [4]. At present, customers can pay a fee to receive 2 GB of storage and 20 MB attachments. A megabyte is a unit of information or computer storage equal to approximately one million bytes. ... Motto: E pluribus unum (1789 to present) (Latin: Out of Many, One) In God We Trust (1956 to present) Anthem: The Star-Spangled Banner Capital Washington, D.C. Largest city New York, New York Official language(s) None at federal level; English de facto Government • President • Vice President Federal republic... Google Inc. ... Gmail is a popular free webmail and POP e-mail service, currently in beta testing, from Google, Inc. ... MSN (or The Microsoft Network) a collection of Internet services provided by Microsoft. ... A gigabyte (derived from the SI prefix giga-) is a unit of information or computer storage equal to one billion bytes. ...

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 and an extention for Mozilla Thunderbird [5]. 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 February 2006. 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, Hotmail Popper, are examples of a free software application that allows email clients access to webmail services through POP3. YPOPs! ², Yahoo POPs, works on Windows, Linux, Solaris and Mac platforms. It's use if for Yahoo only. In computing, local e-mail clients use the Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3), an application-layer Internet standard protocol, to retrieve e-mail from a remote server over a TCP/IP connection. ... Screenshot of Outlook 2003 Microsoft Outlook is a personal information manager from Microsoft, and is part of the Microsoft Office suite. ... Microsoft Outlook Express is an e-mail and news client bundled with certain versions of Microsoft Windows starting with Windows 95 OSR-2. ... One of the first PCs from IBM - the IBM PC model 5150. ... Microsoft Entourage is an email client and personal information manager developed by Microsoft for Mac OS. It is fairly similar to Outlook which Microsoft produce for their Windows platform. ... The first Macintosh computer, introduced in 1984, upgraded to a 512K Fat Mac. The Macintosh, or Mac, line of personal computers is designed, developed, manufactured, and marketed by Apple Computer. ... WebDAV is an IETF working group. ... September 27 is the 270th day of the year (271st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar, with 95 days remaining. ... It has been designated the: International Year of Rice (by the United Nations) International Year to Commemorate the Struggle against Slavery and its Abolition (by UNESCO) 2004 World Health Day topic was Road Safety (by World Health Organization) Year of the Monkey (by the Chinese calendar) See the world in... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Free software, as defined by the Free Software Foundation, is software which can be used, copied, studied, modified and redistributed without restriction. ... An email client (or mail user agent [MUA]) is a computer program that is used to read and send e-mail. ... YPOPs YPOPs! is an application that provides POP3 access to Yahoo! Mail. ...

Hotmail domains

On November 18, 2004, Hotmail began offering email addresses from several country-specific domains. For example, 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. November 18 is the 322nd day of the year (323rd in leap years), with 43 remaining. ... eBay Inc. ... The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (known as the NSPCC) is a UK charity specialising in child protection and the prevention of cruelty to children. ...

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). MSN Messenger is Microsofts instant messaging client for Windows computers aimed toward the home user. ...

In December 2004, Microsoft started its new blogging service called MSN Spaces and integrated it with MSN Messenger and MSN Hotmail. MSN Spaces main page. ... MSN Messenger is Microsofts instant messaging client for Windows computers aimed toward the home user. ...

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. Screenshot of Outlook 2003 Microsoft Outlook is a personal information manager from Microsoft, and is part of the Microsoft Office. ...

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.

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, creating a small decrease in 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, requiring significantly more hardware to maintain the same mail receiving service. 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.

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.

See also

• AIM Mail
• Comparison of webmail providers
• Gmail
• Webmail
• Yahoo! Mail
• MSN Messenger
• Windows Live Mail

AIM Mail is a Web-based e-mail (Webmail) service from America Online (AOL). ... The following tables and gallery compare general and technical information for a number of webmail providers. ... Gmail is a popular free webmail and POP e-mail service, currently in beta testing, from Google, Inc. ... Webmail is a class of web applications that allow users to read and write e-mail using a web browser, or in a more general sense, an e-mail account accessed through such an application. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... MSN Messenger is Microsofts instant messaging client for Windows computers aimed toward the home user. ... Windows Live Mail is a web-based e-mail service by Microsoft. ...

External links

• Hotmail.com
• MSN.com
• MSN Messenger
• One of the first known usenet posts from hotmail.com
• 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)
• Microsoft's MSN Hotmail - XFS

Notes

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

Note 2: YPOPs website, information about the program and download YPOPs