What is Hotmail - an online email service

Hotmail is a web based email service owned by Microsoft, the IT giant. It is now called Windows Live Hotmail and is placed under the Live.com umbrella and aggressively promoted by the company. The service offers both free and paid web based email accounts - the paid accounts are known as Hotmail Plus cost $19.95 per year and come with added benefits such as increased storage space, larger email attachments allowed, no account expiration and, yes, no ads.

Hotmail history - the story of successful online entrepreneurship

Hotmail, founded by Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia, was launched on the 4th of July (US independence day) 1996 and offered free email accounts that could be accessed from any computer, anywhere in the world, as long as it had an active internet connection. Hotmail was probably the first to offer such a service. FYI, the symbolism of the launch date was "freedom" from ISP based email service. By the end of next year, Hotmail had 8.5 million users and was bought by Microsoft (December 1997) for an astronomical sum of $400 million. This means each of the founders, ideally walked away with $200 million apiece - not a pretty bad sum for one and a half years of work.

Hotmail name changes - the brand wins

The name of the service was chosen because it contained the letters HTML, the language in which all web pages are written and to stress upon this the original spelling was "HoTMaiL".
The Hotmail brand was very strong. It had a unique quality and a superb recall value.
After the acquisition by Microsoft, the service was renamed MSN Hotmail and went through many changes in the logo.

At one time, Microsoft had decided to get rid of the "Hotmail" brand and call the service Windows Live Mail but this confused users and the idea was quickly dropped. Such was the "power" of Hotmail brand - catchy and unforgettable. The web based email service is now known as Windows Live Hotmail and we pray for a stop to additional modifications and changes.

Global reach and a growth in popularity

Hotmail's popularity received a major boost after the acquisition by Microsoft in December 1997. From 8.5 million, the user base jumped to 30 million by February of 1999 which is like more than 3 times increase in a little over a year. Microsoft was also responsible for spreading and localization of the service to different markets around the world. Hotmail soon became the biggest web based email service provider.

Hotmail statistics and market share

At the time of writing, Windows Live Hotmail is probably no longer the number one provider of web based email accounts. That slot belongs to Yahoo! Mail. However, there are no concrete statistics and numbers available and, furthermore, different sources quote different figures. Attempts are made to determine the market share of the most popular email services (Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail and Gmail) based on web site usage data, which leads us to a gray area. However, most agree Yahoo! Mail and Windows Live Mail claim the top two spots with similar market share while Gmail's usage statistics puts it a distant third.

Hotmail - the present status

Windows Live Hotmail, presently available in 35 languages, offers 5GB of free storage with up to 10MB attachment size. You can sort emails in folders (a feature missing on Gmail) and pick a theme to change the colors and images of the interface - customize and personalize your Hotmail account with themes. You also get enhanced security, a spell checker when you compose email messages and much more. The service does not show ads (both text and image advertisements are absent) in the interface - ads are attached to the bottom of outgoing messages in the signature. Forwarding is allowed only to email accounts of Microsoft properties (live.com, other hotmail.com etc.) and, though, there has been a hint of POP access for the free accounts, it's still not in place.
Update #1: Some Hotmail users have mentioned seeing ads at the very top of the interface. But I suppose this is not so common.
Update #2: Free Hotmail POP access is available in some countries. The company is rolling out this feature gradually.

Downloading Hotmail emails

Since no forwarding (read above) and POP access is permitted on free Hotmail account, the only way to download Hotmail emails to your computer and preserve a copy is to use another Microsoft product - Windows Live Mail. This is a free email program that runs on Windows XP and Vista operating system. You can follow the steps described in Hotmail set up to configure your account and download your emails.