What Is Hotmail

 By the top of the next yr, Hotmail had 8.5 million customers and was purchased by Microsoft (December 1997) for an astronomical sum of $400 million – each of the founders walked away with $200 million apiece! Not a foul sum for one and a half years of labor, proper?

Hotmail or *Windows Live Hotmail*, as it is now called, is a web-based email service owned by the IT giant, Microsoft. It is a part of Outlook – free personal email and calendar from Microsoft )and aggressively promoted by the company. The service offers both free and paid web-based email account

Hotmail was launched in 1996 by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith in California. In 1997 the company was acquired by Microsoft for approximately $400m and relaunched as MSN Hotmail.

The rebranding did not stop there – it was later rebranded as Windows Live Hotmail before later changing to Outlook.com in 2013. According to Microsoft, the webmail has over 400 million active users as of 2014.

Although Hotmail email addresses still exist, the Hotmail service has been completely replaced by Outlook.com. Functioning as Outlook.com, users get unlimited storage, calender, contacts, Ajax and close integration with OneDrive, Office Online and Skype.