Hotmail
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Outlook Mail inbox in Outlook.com with Skype sidebar open
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Type of site
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Webmail, contacts, tasks, and calendaring |
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| Available in | 106 languages |
| Owner | Microsoft |
| Website | outlook |
| Alexa rank |
 5,891 (December 2016[update]) |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Registration | Required |
| Users | 400 million |
| Launched | July 4, 1996 (as Hotmail) July 31, 2012 (as Outlook.com) |
| Current status | Online |
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Content license
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Proprietary |
Outlook.com is a web-based suite of webmail, contacts, tasks, and calendaring services from Microsoft. One of the world's first webmail services, it was founded in 1996 as Hotmail (stylized as HoTMaiL) by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith in Mountain View, California, and headquartered in Sunnyvale. Microsoft acquired Hotmail in 1997 for an estimated $400 million and launched it as MSN Hotmail, later rebranded to Windows Live Hotmail as part of the Windows Live suite of products. Microsoft released the final version of Hotmail in October 2011, available in 36 languages. It was replaced by Outlook.com in 2013.
Outlook.com follows Microsoft's Metro design-language, closely mimicking the interface of Microsoft Outlook. It also features unlimited storage, a calendar, contacts management, Ajax, and close integration with OneDrive, Office Online and Skype. In May 2015, Microsoft's Outlook Team announced the first update, in Preview, in a planned upgrade of Outlook.com "to a new Office 365-based infrastructure". Microsoft concluded this preview stage in February 2016, when it began to roll out the new version to users' accounts, beginning with North America. As of 2015[update] Outlook.com had 400 million active users.
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 and the ability to access a user's inbox from anywhere in the world. 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"). The limit for free storage was 2 MB. Hotmail was initially backed by venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. 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.
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