In June 2001, Microsoft claimed this had been completed a few days later they retracted the statement and admitted that the DNS functions of the Hotmail system were still reliant on FreeBSD. A project was started to move Hotmail to Windows 2000. Hotmail originally ran on a mixture of FreeBSD and Solaris operating systems. Hotmail quickly gained in popularity as it was localized for different markets around the globe, and became the world's largest webmail service with more than 30 million active members reported by February 1999. The sale had been preceded by a major incident in 1997 where all email was lost for 25% of mailboxes.

Hotmail was sold to Microsoft in December 1997 for a reported $400 million (~$636 million in 2021), and it joined the MSN group of services. MSN Hotmail A 2001 Hotmail inbox layout embedded in Microsoft Outlook The old MSN Hotmail inbox from 2007 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. By December 1997, it reported more than 8.5 million subscribers. Hotmail was initially backed by venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. The name 'Hotmail' 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 'HoTMaiL'). It was commercially launched on July 4, 1996, symbolizing 'freedom' from ISP-based email and the ability to access a user's inbox from anywhere in the world. 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). Outlook is offered with any Microsoft account, using as well as and (which are no longer offered) domains.

It was changed back to Hotmail in October 2011 and was fully replaced by Outlook in February 2013, sharing the same brand as the Microsoft Outlook software which is offered via a Microsoft 365 (formerly Microsoft Office) subscription. In May 2007, the service was rebranded to Windows Live Hotmail, as part of the Windows Live suite of products. Outlook can also be accessed via email clients using the IMAP or POP protocols.įounded in 1996 by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith as Hotmail, it was acquired by Microsoft in 1997 for an estimated $400 million, with it becoming part of the MSN family of online services, branded as MSN Hotmail. It includes a webmail interface featuring mail, calendaring, contacts, and tasks services. , formerly Hotmail, is a free personal email service offered by Microsoft.

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