MSN Hotmail

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{{Infobox_Software | name = | logo = Image:MSN Hotmail.gif
| screenshot = Image:Msn hotmail frontpage of.PNG | caption = Hotmail's login page | developer = Microsoft | latest_release_version = | latest_release_date = | latest_preview_version = | latest_preview_date = | operating_system = | genre = E-mail, webmail | license = | website = www.hotmail.com }}

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.

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

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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 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.

Image:Hotmail classic logo.gif

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 $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].

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Storage

Hotmail offers 250 MB of free e-mail storage (although there is a 10 MB attachment limit) for users in the US, Brazil, Canada, the UK, Spain and Australia; users in other countries may get a mailbox limit of 10 MB, which is anyway 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.

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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 extention 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 February 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 Template:Fn, Hotmail Popper, are examples of a free software application that allows email clients access to webmail services through POP3. YPOPs! Template:Fn, Yahoo POPs, works on Windows, Linux, Solaris and Mac platforms. It's used for Yahoo only.

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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.

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E-mail services

Image:MSN Hotmail.gifMSN Hotmail - Basic, free e-mail. Includes 250 MB of e-mail storage and 10 MB attachments.

Image:MSN Hotmail Plus.gifMSN Hotmail Plus - $19.95 a year. Includes 2 GB of e-mail storage, 20 MB attachments, and no graphical advertisements.

Image:Outlook Live.gifMicrosoft 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.

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Criticisms

Hotmail does however, have certain criticisms. 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 problems do start arising. People are frequently "locked out" of their accounts, as they are asked to type in their email and password. A cookie generated by clicking "submit", is subsequently blocked by either browser or firewall. Consquently, instead of the hotmail account appearing, the previous login screen appears. Therefore, one with only a basic understanding of the internet could be locked out, in theory, for months. Furthermore, hotmail's help service doesn't even display that cookie protection should be turned off, or set to a minimum, (it is also a consenus that Microsoft's customer care towards free users is generally poor).

Because hotmail only tolerates account inactivity (with free users) for only about a month (quite short compared to 9 months with Google Mail), the account may be terminated while the user still cannot login properly due to the cookie block.

Hotmail and it's full features only seem to work properly with Internet Explorer, (a Microsoft product). Whether this is to help stop the proliferation of open-source browsers like Mozilla Firefox, or not is unclear.

Finally, a space of 250 MB only becomes available for free users after 30 days, other email services often give the user storage space immediately. Because of the above criticisms and problems, people are becoming, (as a consenus), disatisfied with the hotmail service and are mostly switching over to Google Mail.

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Miscellaneous

At the Hotmail main screen, users can access integrated MSN services such as Calendar and Contacts (the latter being shared with MSN Messenger).

In December 2004, Microsoft started its new blogging service called MSN Spaces and integrated it with MSN 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. 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.

Hotmail's full features are not available on browsers other than Microsoft Internet Explorer. These features include a customised right-click context menu to make Hotmail function similar to Microsoft's Outlook mail clients.

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