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History
The Hotmail logo before it was rebranded under MSN.
The Hotmail logo before it was rebranded under MSN.

Hotmail, founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith in 1995 as the first Webmail, was commercially launched on July 4, 1996, Independence Day in the United States, symbolically representing freedom from ISPs.[citation needed] 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, which is still styled in that format within part of the URL of the user's email inbox when signed in.

Hotmail was initially backed by the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. By December 1997, Hotmail reported more than 8.5 million subscribers[1].

It was sold later that month to Microsoft for a reported US$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.

Hotmail originally ran on a mixture of FreeBSD and Solaris,[3][4] operating systems. Microsoft initially tried to move the FreeBSD portion of the architecture to a Windows NT 4.0 based system and this failed. Later a project was started to move the system to Windows 2000. In June 2001 Microsoft claimed this had been completed, however, a few days later they retracted this and admitted that in fact some functions of the Hotmail system were still reliant on FreeBSD.[5]

The Hotmail development and operations teams are based in Mountain View, California.

Microsoft intended to phase out Hotmail in favor of "Windows Live Mail", but has since rebranded the service "Windows Live Hotmail", keeping the Hotmail name intact.