Outlook.com

Hotmail service was founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith in 1996. It was one of the first webmail services on the Internet along with Four11’s RocketMail. Hotmail was sold to Microsoft in 1997 for an estimated USD 400 million. The service is free to use, with a limit of 2 MB of free storage per account.

About Outlook.com in brief

Summary Outlook.comHotmail service was founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith in 1996. It was one of the first webmail services on the Internet along with Four11’s RocketMail. Hotmail was sold to Microsoft in 1997 for an estimated USD 400 million. Microsoft phased out Hotmail in October 2011, relaunching the service as Outlook. com in 2012. Outlook. com is a personal information manager web app from Microsoft consisting of webmail, calendaring, contacts, and tasks services. It is part of the Windows Live suite of products. The service is free to use, with a limit of 2 MB of free storage per account. It has more than 30 million active members reported by February 1999. In 1999, hackers revealed a security flaw in Hotmail that permitted anybody to log in to any Hotmail account using the password ‘eh’. At the time it was called \”the most widespread security incident in the history of the Web\”. In 2004, Google announced its own mail service, Gmail. Featuring greater storage space, speed, and interface flexibility, this new competitor spurred a wave of innovation in webmail. The main industry heavyweights – Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail – introduced upgraded versions of their email services with greater speed, security, and advanced features. 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 and preferred the already well-known Hotmail name on Windows Live.

After a period of beta testing, it was officially released as a new service on November 9, 2006, to new and existing users in the Netherlands. The old MSN Hotmail interface was accessible only by users registered before the release of the new service. The new service was built from scratch and emphasized three main concepts of being \”faster, simpler, and safer\”. It was awarded Windows Live Magazine’s Editor’s Choice Award in October 2007, as the new system was accessible to only the 260 million MSN hotmail accounts worldwide. The name Hotmail is chosen out of many possibilities ending in \”-mail\” as it included the letters HTML, the markup language used to create web pages. The limit for free storage was 2 MB. 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. 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, and integration with MSN Messenger and MSN Spaces. In 2001, the Hotmail service were compromised again by computer hackers who discovered that anyone could log in and then pull messages from any other Hot mail account by crafting a URL with a valid message number.