HOTMAIL, ONE OF THE WORLD'S FIRST WEBMAIL SERVICES

Hotmail

Today, The Grandma is still suffering the effects of the terrible heat wave that is affecting the Mediterranean. She has decided to study a new lesson of her Ms. Excel course and starting to prepare new exercises to be sent by mail.

She uses Gmail and Hotmail without distinction although today she wants to talk about Hotmail, now Outlook, to commemorate the date of its birth on a day like today in 1996, the same date that Americans celebrate their Independence from the United Kingdom, the famous Fourth of July.

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Hotmail, now Outlook.com, is a web-based suite of webmail, contacts, tasks, and calendaring services from Microsoft. One of the world's first webmail services, it was founded in 1996 as Hotmail, stylized as HoTMaiL, by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith in Mountain View, California, and headquartered in Sunnyvale.

Microsoft acquired Hotmail in 1997 for an estimated $400 million and launched it as MSN Hotmail, later rebranded to Windows Live Hotmail as part of the Windows Live suite of products. Microsoft released the final version of Hotmail in October 2011 and it was replaced by Outlook.com in 2012.

Hotmail service was founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith, and was one of the first webmail services on the Internet along with Four11's RocketMail, later Yahoo! Mail. It was commercially launched on July 4, 1996, symbolizing freedom from ISP-based email and the ability to access a user's inbox from anywhere in the world. The name Hotmail was chosen out of many possibilities ending in -mail as it included the letters HTML, the markup language used to create web pages, to emphasize this, the original type casing was HoTMaiL. The limit for free storage was 2 MB.

More information: MSN Hotmail

Hotmail was initially backed by venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. By December 1997, it reported more than 8.5 million subscribers. Hotmail initially ran under Solaris for mail services and Apache on FreeBSD for web services, before being partly converted to Microsoft products, using Windows Services for UNIX in the migration path.

Hotmail was sold to Microsoft in December 1997 for a reported $400 million, and it joined the MSN group of services. Hotmail quickly gained in popularity as it was localized for different markets around the globe, and became the world's largest webmail service with more than 30 million active members reported by February 1999.

Hotmail

Hotmail originally ran on a mixture of FreeBSD and Solaris operating systems. A project was started to move Hotmail to Windows 2000. In June 2001, Microsoft claimed this had been completed; a few days later they retracted and admitted that the DNS functions of the Hotmail system were still reliant on FreeBSD.

In 2002 Hotmail still ran its infrastructure on UNIX servers, with only the front-end converted to Windows 2000. Later development saw the service tied with Microsoft's web authentication scheme, Microsoft Passport, now Microsoft account, and integration with Microsoft's instant messaging and social networking programs, MSN Messenger and MSN Spaces, later Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Spaces, respectively.

Microsoft's new email system was announced on November 1, 2005, under the codename Kahuna, and a beta version was released to a few thousand testers. Other webmail enthusiasts also wanting to try the beta version could request an invitation granting access. The new service was built from scratch and emphasized three main concepts of being faster, simpler, and safer. New versions of the beta service were rolled out over the development period, and by the end of 2006 the number of beta testers had reached the millions.

The Hotmail brand was planned to be phased-out when Microsoft announced that the new mail system would be called Windows Live Mail, but the developers soon backtracked after beta-testers were confused with the name change and preferred the already well-known Hotmail name, and decided on Windows Live Hotmail.

More information: SeForum

After a period of beta testing, it was officially released to new and existing users in the Netherlands on November 9, 2006, as a pilot market. Development of the beta was finished in April 2007, Windows Live Hotmail was released to new registrations on May 7, 2007, as the 260 million MSN Hotmail accounts worldwide gained access to the new system.

The old MSN Hotmail interface was accessible only by users who registered before the Windows Live Hotmail release date and had not chosen to update to the new service. The roll-out to all existing users was completed in October 2007.

Outlook.com was first introduced on July 31, 2012 when its beta version was made available to the general public. Existing Hotmail customers could freely upgrade to the preview version of Outlook.com and downgrade back.

Similar to other major webmail services, Outlook.com uses Ajax programming techniques and supports later versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Google Chrome. Some of its features include keyboard controls giving the ability to navigate around the page without using the mouse, the ability to search the user's messages including structured query syntax such as from:ebay, message filters, folder-based organization of messages, auto-completion of contact addresses when composing, contact grouping, importing and exporting of contacts as CSV files, rich text formatting, rich text signatures, spam filtering and virus scanning, support for multiple addresses, and different language versions.

Microsoft has released client applications for Android and iOS, allowing users to access their inboxes and send new messages.

More information: Express

Hotmail grew its base faster than any company I can think of.

Steve Jurvetson