Hotmail.com – Email Where You Need It
Hotmail (www.hotmail.com.au) is one of the world's largest providers of free web-based e-mail. Find out how to login or use POP3 to download and read your email wherever you are.
Hotmail.com Webmail
Hotmail is the first and the most well known webmail program launched in the mid ’90s. It still evolves and adds new features like Hotmail POP3 access, an integrated audio player for voicemail and a rich Ajax-based web interface.
The original service was founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith, and was one of the first webmail services on the Internet. It was commercially launched on July 4, 1996, American Independence Day, symbolizing “freedom” from ISP-based e-mail and the ability to access a user’s inbox from anywhere in the world. The name was chosen out of many possibilities ending in “-mail” as it included the letters HTML – the coding used behind all web pages. Originally, Hotmail was written down as “HoTMaiL” – the capital latters making the word HTML. By December 1997 (1,5 years after launch), it reported more than 8.5 million subscribers. Hotmail was acquired by Microsoft in 1997 for an estimated $400 million, and rebranded as “MSN Hotmail” and then as “Windows Live Hotmail” in 2005 and released worldwide in 2007 (Source: Wikipedia Hotmail).
Hotmail Login & POP3 Details
The current day system boasts a very powerful anti-spam protection engine and a generous 5GB space allocation for email storage. Earlier this year Microsoft announced that they enabled SMTP and POP3, which meant that users can now download emails directly to their home computers or even mobile phones.
Here are the details for Hotmail POP3 and SMTP
- POP3: pop3.live.com (Port 995)
- POP SSL required? Yes
- User name: Your Windows Live ID, for example yourname@hotmail.com
- Password: Your Hotmail or Windows Live password
- SMTP: smtp.live.com (Port 25)
- Authentication required? Yes (same as POP username and password)
- TLS/SSL required? Yes
- Secure Connection: Always use a secure connection (SSL) when retrieving mail
Hotmail Sign Up
To sign up for Hotmail is easy. As with everything else, fill in your details, agree to the terms and conditions and hit enter. Your new @hotmail address will also be your Windows Live ID which you’ll be able to use to access other sites and services (for example, to login to MSN Messenger). Once your new email address is active you will receive notices and service updates and even advertisements from Windows Live, Bing and so on. At this stage it is not clear whether it is possible to opt-out from receiving these emails to your Hotmail address.
And finally… a bit of history. Here are some screen shots of Hotmail over time.
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- Hotmail Logo Evolution
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- 1997
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- 1999
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- 2006
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- 2009
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- 2002
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Windows Live@Edu
Hotmail evolved a lot and now offers Windows Live@Edu – free email to educational institutions around the world. The latest one in Perth was Curtin University that just deployed the system to their Graduate Business School.
I have to say that interface is very light and fast – a great improvement since the old IMP/Horde based email system. With Hotmail Live@Edu you get 10GB mail box and a range of Microsoft tools.
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The review "Hotmail.com – Email Where You Need It" was last updated on 14/5/09.
I reckon Hotmail was the a start of social networking the way we know it today. It was a bold idea back then to make email available anywhere in the world. I remember receiving an email from someone who used it, and I thought, wow, this system is really hot! I’m also glad to see that it developed a lot in the recent years and is very fast and is able to compete with gmail and yahoo mail. (Now that yahoo and MS are one, it’ll be interesting to see what’s going to happen with the two webmail systems).
Curtin university in Perth announced that they will be migrating their student email accounts to Microsoft Live@edu – I suppose it’s similar to hotmail.com.au? Here is that link: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Curtin-Uni-picks-Microsoft-Live-edu/0,130061733,339298340,00.htm
It’s all that computer storage could rubbish. It’s amazing how many people and businesses get on that band-wagon which is no more than just what we know as “cluster”. www,hotmail.com.au for university email? That is very professional! There must be very skillful sales people at MS to sell @live to a university like Curtin.
Ben – Live@edu and Hotmail are two different systems. Live@edu hosted email is actually quite nice..
Live@edu looks good – http://www.microsoft.com/liveatedu/free-hosted-student-email.aspx It sounds to me like a nobrainer. Why bother with in-house email when you can outsource the whole lot, cheaper to a more reliable system like that. I wonder how it compares with business gmail though..
Actually, it looks like Hotmail accounts can be used to login to that webmai system. Just came across this page that describes how to create Hotmail account logins for students: http://www.microsoft.com/liveatedu/hotmail-deployment-tool-options.aspx?locale=en-US&country=US
I don’t know about that. once you outsource your [university] email, you loose control. Who do you call when the system is down? How do you troubleshoot your hotmail/education accounts? “Cloud storage”, “hosted email” all sounds good, as long as you have direct access to that “cloud”. I think it won’t be long before we’ll hear some disaster stories about it all.
That would be nice if they offered @hotmail.com.au address as well as @hotmail.com.
I remember hotmail from way back. It was a nice little webmail system. But oh, boy, it was soo slow!
I don’t think that Live@Edu is the same as Hotmail. It’s two different systems, even though both branded as Live emails.
I need to got on