Hotmail is a free “webmail” e-mail service, which is accessible via a web browser.
Hotmail 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 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.Hotmail serves e-mail accounts in many countries, supporting 15 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.
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.
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
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 @My Domain.com
