Category: Hotmail

Hotmail is a personal information manager web app from Microsoft consisting of webmail, calendaring, contacts, and tasks services. Founded in 1996 by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith, Hotmail was acquired by Microsoft in 1997 for an estimated $400 million and relaunched as MSN Hotmail, later rebranded to Windows Live Hotmail as part of the Windows Live suite of products. Microsoft phased out Hotmail in October 2011, relaunching the service as 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[8] and the ability to access a user’s inbox from anywhere in the world. The name 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). The limit for free storage was 2 MB. Was initially backed by venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. By December 1997, it reported more than 8.5 million subscribers.[10] Initially ran under Solaris for mail services and Apache on FreeBSD for web services, before being partly converted to Microsoft products,[11][12] using Windows Services for UNIX in the migration path.[13]