From TheBestLinks.com
Hotmail is one of the popular free 'webmail' email services, which are accessible from anywhere on the planet via a standard web browser. It was founded by Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia in 1995, and was commercially launched on July 4, 1996, Independence Day in the U.S., symbolically representing freedom from ISPs.
Jack Smith first had the idea of accessing e-mail via the web from a computer anywhere in the world. 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 for hotmail as it included the letters "HTML" - the markup language used to write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casing.
Hotmail was backed by the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson and was later sold to Microsoft corporation, which rebranded it under its MSN umbrella. By December 1997, Hotmail reported more than 8.5 million subscribers. [1] (http://news.com.com/2100-1023-206039.html?legacy=cnet) By February 1999 it reported more than 30 million active members. [2] (http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/1999/02-08hotmail.asp) Hotmail serves e-mail accounts in many countries and is currently the largest webmail provider.
Hotmail offers its members 250MB of free e-mail storage, be it used for sent or received e-mail. However a large number of those with accounts predating this offer still have only 2MB storage. For a fee, customers have had the use of 2GB storage. In contrast, Yahoo! Mail offers 100MB for free with 2GB offered at a price, Gmail from Google offers 1GB for free.
While Hotmail does not have POP3 email access, it is possible to check your email using Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, using the WebDAV protocol.
NOTE : as of October 2004 Microsoft discontinued offering the service for free. However; a pay service remained available.
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