Launch of Hotmail
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).[10][11] It was commercially launched on July 4, 1996, symbolizing "freedom" from ISP-based email[12] 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.[13] Hotmail was initially backed by venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. By December 1997, it reported more than 8.5 million subscribers.[14] Hotmail initially ran under Solaris for mail services and Apache on FreeBSD for web services, before being partly converted to Microsoft products,[15][16] using Windows Services for UNIX in the migration path.[17]
MSN Hotmail
Hotmail was sold to Microsoft in December 1997 for a reported $400 million (~$ in ), and it joined the MSN group of services.[18] The sale had been preceded by a major incident in 1997 where all email was lost for 25% of mailboxes.[19] 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.[20]
Hotmail originally ran on a mixture of FreeBSD and Solaris operating systems.[21] A project was started to move Hotmail to Windows 2000. 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. In 2002 Hotmail still ran its infrastructure on UNIX servers, with only the front-end converted to Windows 2000.[22]
Security issues
In 1999, hackers revealed a security flaw in Hotmail that permitted anybody to log in to any Hotmail account using the password 'eh'. At the time, it was called "the most widespread security incident in the history of the Web".[23] In 2001, the Hotmail service was compromised again by computer hackers who discovered that anyone could log in to their Hotmail account and then pull messages from any other Hotmail account by crafting a URL with the second account's username and a valid message number. It was such a simple attack that by the time the patch was made, dozens of newspapers and hundreds of web sites published exact descriptions allowing tens of thousands of hackers to run rampant across Hotmail. The exploitable vulnerability exposed millions of accounts to tampering between August 7 and 31, 2001.[24][25]
Competition
In 2004, Google announced its own mail service, Gmail. Featuring greater storage space, speed, and interface flexibility, it spurred a wave of innovation in webmail.[26] The main industry heavyweights – Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail – introduced upgraded versions of their email services with greater speed, security, and advanced features.[27][28]
Windows Live Hotmail
Microsoft's new email system was announced on November 1, 2005, under the codename "Kahuna", and a beta version was released to a few thousand testers. Other webmail enthusiasts also wanting to try the beta version could request an invitation granting access. The new service was built from scratch and emphasized three main concepts of being "faster, simpler, and safer". New versions of the beta service were rolled out over the development period, and by the end of 2006 the number of beta testers had reached the millions.[29]
The Hotmail brand was planned to be phased out when Microsoft announced that the new mail system would be called Windows Live Mail, but the developers soon backtracked after beta testers were confused with the name change and preferred the already well-known Hotmail name, and decided on Windows Live Hotmail. After a period of beta testing, it was officially released to new and existing users in the Netherlands on November 9, 2006, as a pilot market. Development of the beta was finished in April 2007, and Windows Live Hotmail was released to new registrations on May 7, 2007,[30] as the 260 million MSN Hotmail accounts worldwide gained access to the new system. The old MSN Hotmail interface was accessible only by users who registered before the Windows Live Hotmail release date and had not chosen to update to the new service. The rollout to all existing users was completed in October 2007.
Windows Live Hotmail was awarded PC Magazine's Editor's Choice Award in February 2007,[31]
Transition to Outlook.com
Outlook.com was first introduced on July 31, 2012, when its beta version was made available to the general public. Existing Hotmail customers could freely upgrade to the preview version of Outlook.com and downgrade back.[50]
Outlook.com graduated preview stage on February 18, 2013. The upgrade was deployed the same day, users kept their existing Hotmail accounts and received the option of having an @outlook.com email address.[51] By May 2013, the upgrade was completed and Outlook.com had 400 million active users.[6] By May 2014, Outlook.com continued to have 400 million active users.[52]
Transition to new infrastructure
In May 2015, Microsoft announced it would move the service over to what it described as an
Transition to new infrastructure
In May 2015, Microsoft announced it would move the service over to what it described as an Office 365-based infrastructure. This was followed in June 2015 by the introduction through an opt-in preview of new features, including new calendar layout options, a filtering service called "Clutter" and new theme designs. Microsoft also introduced the ability for third-party providers such as PayPal and Evernote to include add-ins into the service. Additionally, contact suggestions and updates from emails such as flight reservations are due to be introduced to Office 365 subscribers' accounts and Outlook.com users' from January and March 2016 respectively.[53] With the upgrade, users were no longer able to use the Windows Live Mail 2012 client to synchronize their email, contacts and calendar event using the official settings; they were encouraged to view Outlook.com through a web browser, through the Mail app, or through the Microsoft Outlook client.[54] However, Windows Live Mail could be configured to use the IMAP protocol (or the less effective POP3) to fetch mail only.[55][56]
2017 redesign
On August 8, 2017, Microsoft launched a new opt-in beta toggle allowing users to test upcoming changes to the Outlook.com Mail, including a faster inbox, a responsive design, and the ability to search for emojis.[58] There was also an introduction of the Photos Hub, the fifth component of Outlook.com.[59]
On October 30, 2017, Microsoft announced that it would phase out its "Outlook.com Premium" subscription service, which offered features such as expanded storage and removal of ads from the user interface. These benefits were subsequently made available to Office 365 subscribers, and Microsoft will no longer accept new subscriptions to Outlook.com Premium. Existing Outlook.com Premium subscribers may continue to renew their existing subscription.[60]
The old interface, which dated from 2016, was phased out in 2019.
