Hotmail's login page Maintainer: Microsoft Use: E-mail, webmail Website: www.hotmail.com MSN 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. Contents 1 History 2 Storage 3 POP3 access 4 Hotmail domains 5 E-mail services 6 Criticisms 7 Miscellaneous 8 See also 9 External links 10 Notes History Hotmail, founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith 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. 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 US$400m, after which it was rebranded under the MSN umbrella. 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]. Storage Hotmail offers 250 MB of free e-mail storage (although there is a 10 MB attachment limit) for users in 24 countries, among them the US, Brazil, Canada, the UK, Spain and Australia; users in other countries may get a mailbox limit of 25 MB, which is 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. Some countries still get only 2MB of mailbox limit. 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 extension 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 May 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 is an example of a free software application that allows email clients access to webmail (including Hotmail) services through POP3. 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. 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. E-mail services MSN Hotmail - Basic, free e-mail. Includes 250 MB of e-mail storage and 10 MB attachments. MSN Hotmail Plus - $19.95 a year. Includes 2 GB of e-mail storage, 20 MB attachments, and no graphical advertisements. Microsoft Office Outlook Live - $44.95 a year. Includes 2 GB of e-mail storage, 20 MB attachments, and no graphical advertisements. Also includes Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 for Subscription Services with free upgrades, allowing users to synchronize Hotmail with Outlook. Criticisms This section may contain original research or unverified claims. Please help Wikipedia by adding references. See the talk page for details. Hotmail has been criticised for a number of reasons. The service is very sensitive to cookie settings on respective browsers and firewalls. If both of the latter are configured to block cookies, even at a relative "low" setting, then users may be "locked out" of their accounts. Hotmail only tolerates account inactivity (for free users) for 3 months and so users may find their account is terminated if they cannot log in for a long period. Some users have suggested that Microsoft's customer care towards free users is poor. Hotmail's full features are only available to users accessing the site via Microsoft's own Internet Explorer browser. These features include a customised right-click context menu to make Hotmail function in a similar way to Microsoft's Outlook mail clients. The latest version (currently in Beta as 'Windows Live Mail') is apparently working towards this sort of functionality within other browsers. Hotmail has been criticised for waiting for 30 days to activate the 250 MB storage allowance on new accounts - some other email services give the user their full quota immediately. Using Safari as your browser on Apple Mac computers the new look Hotmail is almost totally inaccessible. Free Hotmail members cannot to set up filters to delete incoming e-mails containing certain terms - some other free email providers allow this. Hotmail has been claimed to discriminate against users by the country they are in, because they allow only 2MB of space to members in some countries while offering 250MB to members in other ones. Miscellaneous At the Hotmail main screen, users can access integrated MSN services such as Calendar and Contacts (the latter being shared with Windows Live Messenger). In December 2004, Microsoft started its new blogging service called MSN Spaces and integrated it with Windows Live Messenger and MSN Hotmail. 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; however this is now defunct. 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. See also MSN AIM Mail Comparison of webmail providers Gmail Webmail Yahoo! Mail Windows Live Messenger Windows Live Mail Windows Live ID 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) Microsoft's MSN Hotmail - XFS Gotmail Perl script which non-interactively downloads mail from hotmail Notes Note 1: FreePOPs website (for more information about program, program download) FreePOPs Microsoft Corporation Software:  Windows • Office • Server System • Dynamics • Visual Studio • Money • Encarta • Defender • more... Technology:  Active Directory • DirectX • .NET • Internet Explorer • Windows Media • more... 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