Viewing email is possible, today, from your mobile phone, from any computer and even from your own smartwatch. But it wasn’t just over twenty years ago. Hotmail was a change in the way we read emails and today we explain everything you need to know about this service: what was the history of Hotmail , what it allowed, how to use old accounts or if we can really continue today creating an account @ hotmail.com.
If you are over 25 years old, it is very likely that you have ever used Hotmail. You used Messenger to talk to friends and family and sent the classic buzzes. But Hotmail is so much more than those endless conversations and nicknames full of emojis. It was born during the nineties and it became a revolution in the way we communicate …
History of Hotmail
Hotmail was born in the mid-nineties. His parents were two, Saber Bhatia and Jack Smith. In 1995, these two protagonists work for Apple and they met studying a postgraduate degree at Stanford University at a time when email already existed and was widely used. But a nuisance. They wanted to create an email that was accessible from wherever they were, from work or college. This is how they began to think about an idea.
An email that does not need any type of program, server or software to function, that is accessible anywhere, from the browser. And it was precisely this idea of the browser that gave it its name: through the HTML concept, created many years before, they came up with the idea of its name: HoTMaiL. A union between HTML and “mail” , an email for the browser, accessible to all and with the idea that it was a totally free system for users.
Getting Hotmail free was not easy for its creators. There were many attempts to get sponsors, funding. Nobody was betting on them until the Draper Fisher Juvetson company did. In July of the following year, in 1996, it would begin to be a reality. As a “tribute” to the freedom that Hotmail supposed us (freedom to navigate from wherever we wanted, to connect without paying, easy…) this system was released on July 4, 1996 , Independence Day in the United States.
the beginning
Hotmail was not in its beginnings as you may remember it. It was not a platform full of options, colors, emojis, buzzes or even moving stickers that we could add to the chats. It was much simpler and, above all, much more limited. In its beginnings, perhaps the elderly remember it, we only had 2 MB per user to store emails (15 GB Gmail offers us today) Something much smaller than what we have today but that seemed to be enough for millions people: in its first week it has already got one million registered users. One year after its launch, Hotmail already had more than eight million subscribers around the world.
Its success was such that it did not go unnoticed by Microsoft. A year and a half after starting a project that no finance company was betting on, Microsoft paid 400 million dollars. Hotmail had, at that time, nine million users. In December 1997 Microsoft bought Hotmail and unified the service with MSN, looking much more like the one we all remember, the “WhatsApp” from the beginning of the century. The merger achieved the desired effect: more visibility, more popularity, more users. So much so that only three years later, in 1999, there were 30 million active users and Hotmail was, after Microsoft’s purchase, the largest “webmail” service in the world.
MSN Messenger and MSN Spaces
Hotmail offered everything that could be asked of it: it was an email system through the browser and it also allowed us to connect to MSN Messenger as an instant messaging program or even access MSN Spaces or those “spaces” that were the before Tuenti, from Instagram. Spaces where there was room to upload photo albums, write texts with colors.
MSN Messenger allowed us, in 2005, to make video calls with friends or contacts for free, to use chats and groups to talk with several people at the same time and even instant messaging to the mobile phone if we have one. I had also added all the personalization we remember today: the buzzes, the winks, the contact cards, the personalized backgrounds. We could put “status” songs from Messenger or we could customize the “My space” section to our liking.
But while Hotmail offered almost everything, it already had competition.
The feared rival: Google
Yahoo had already been Messenger’s main rival for years and even launched, in 2005, its “Yahoo! 360º ”very similar to the remembered spaces of Messenger. In addition, it offered email and was intended to “encourage investment in social networks.” But he wasn’t the only one either. Google was already thinking about Gmail and it already had Blogger, which had been launched in 1998 as one of the first websites or tools for “ blogging ”, a term that today sounds absolutely obsolete but twenty years ago it sounded new, like current. Google also had Picasa since its purchase in 2004, so users also had a kind of online album that allowed them to replace those MSN spaces and where to upload photos ordered by categories, organize them, etc.
And Gmail . In 2004, Google announced that it would launch its own email service and would become Hotmail’s main rival, along with the aforementioned Yahoo! Those from Mountain View announced speed, more storage than their competitor offered us, greater security. This inevitably caused Microsoft to decide to bet on its new version Microsoft Live Hotmail (initially thought of as Microsoft Live Mail ) which would include improvements, more speed and more security. Users could migrate their mail to this new service that years later (in 2010) would include updates with space for photos or integration with the online version of Office.
Although they initially resisted modifying or migrating all Hotmail emails, Microsoft ended up taking them to Outlook.com without the user (this time it was different from the previous one) doing anything. The company announced in February 2013 that there would be an (automatic) migration of all Hotmail accounts. They would work through Outlook with a much more intuitive, more comfortable, cleaner interface. A migration that was completed in May 2013 with hundreds of millions of users.
Hotmail disappears
Microsoft announced that Hotmail would disappear. In the second decade of the 21st century, webmail had lost relevance and the presence of Gmail around the world was beginning to be noticed. Today it is much more common to use the Google service as email, especially due to its connection with Android smartphones, for example. Microsoft decides to take all its accounts to another service: Outlook. Outlook already existed and was part of the Microsoft suite so Hotmail did not disappear, it was absorbed.
It was then, in 2012, when Hotmail began to migrate to Outlook.com, keeping the @ hotmail.com extension but trying to offer a more modern experience.
Now we can continue using this service but with a name change, through Microsoft, through Outlook. Since the mail service was baptized with Outlook.com, it must be said that it has been quite modernized and now has a much more minimalist design. In addition, it has certain characteristics similar to those that we can find in Gmail and many others that are reminiscent of Microsoft Office’s Outlook itself.
Recover Hotmail accounts
Hotmail email accounts are not currently closed accounts. Unlike other services that are now defunct, these accounts are still valid. That is, if you had an email with @ hotmail.com, you can keep using it. Although you cannot open your Messenger like before, you can use it. Since 2012, all Hotmail accounts automatically became Outlook client email accounts. The procedure has changed but you still have access to all the emails you had, to everything you had saved. Of course, from the Microsoft service.
One of the main advantages of Hotmail email accounts over other old accounts is that you don’t lose them due to inactivity. Even if it has been five, six or twelve years that you have not opened Hotmail, nothing happens because you can continue using the mail and accessing your inbox, the account is not closed. To check your emails, you must follow a few simple steps:
- Open the Microsoft Outlook web page
- Enter your email account
- Enter your password (if you remember)
You will access all your emails and the inbox
Create a new Hotmail account
If you’re excited or just want to have a Hotmail account, you can still create one. You can create it from the Microsoft website , from the Outlook service. To create a new account, the first thing we have to do is go to signup.live.com and follow the steps shown below:
- Open the Microsoft registration website
- Click on “Create account”
- Choose the option “Get a new email address
- Here you will see a space to write your email and a drop-down
- Click on the dropdown
- You will see three options appear: Outlook.es / Outtlook.com / Hotmail.com
- Choose Hotmail.com
- Fill in your information to create your new email
- Click on “Next”
- You will have to enter a password
- Click on “Next” accepting the contracts and privacy
- Write your name and surname and follow the remaining steps
You will have created your new Hotmail.com email account even though we are already in the third decade of the 21st and it seems somewhat obsolete. You can use it whenever you want by accessing it as we have explained in the previous section, from Outlook.com in its web version or by downloading the applications or the desktop client that allows us to always have it at hand.
