The sale had been preceded by a major incident in 1997 where all email was lost for 25 % of mailboxes. Hotmail was sold to Microsoft in December 1997 for a reported $400 million, and it joined the MSN group of services. 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. By December 1997, it reported more than 8.5 million subscribers. Hotmail was initially backed by venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

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').

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. Post questions, follow discussions and share your knowledge in the Community.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). To get help and troubleshoot other Microsoft products and services, enter your problem here. If you can't sign in, click here.įor other help with your Microsoft account and subscriptions, visit Account & Billing Help. To contact us in, you'll need to sign in. If the self-help doesn't solve your problem, scroll down to Still need help? and select Yes. To get support in, click here or select on the menu bar and enter your query. You can also get support from other users in our Community forum, or get help by selecting Contact Support below: Which browsers work with Office for the web and Office Add-ins Still need help? If you're still having problems with signing in, read When you can't sign in to your Microsoft account. On the Enter password page, clear Keep me signed in. Go to the sign-in page and select Sign in.Įnter your email address or phone number and select Next. In, select your account picture at the top of the screen.

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