Hotmail email was the first free email provider which began on 4th of July, 1996. It has been started by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith. The explanation for picking July 4 as a launch day was exactly to symbolize independence, it being Independence Day. The advantage of Hotmail email when it was commercially released was that you may check out your email all over the world without a trouble.

Being one of the free email providers, its reputation and benefits became the key center of attraction and aspect of its success. Hotmail email proved to be a notable turning point in the history of internet and e-communication.

The name Hotmail was taken upon by adding to HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), which is the prevalent encoding computer language during the time.One other reason it was selected to be called Hotmail was that it ended in "mail" and also happened to fit in properly with HTML For that reason, its first name was selected to be HoTMaiL. It was released with the assistance of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, a capital raising organization. It became popular, so much that it had 8.5 million users by the point it was sold to Microsoft in December of 1997. It was sold for 400 million dollars and re-branded as MSN Hotmail and later was renamed Windows Live Hotmail, as it is known now. The count stood at 343 million in July 2009, which up to now is an increasing number.

Hotmail ran on Solaris and FreeBSD operating systems until about 2000 when Microsoft had changed it over to Windows 2000 but still keeping the DNS features on FreeBSD for a while. The initial period of transition saw numerous security threats that endangered the Hotmail system. The first was when "eh" was accepted as the password to access any Hotmail user account. This followed up by a security breach, a year later, when a user could log in to his account and gain access to another user's message by modifying the account username and message number value (that was valid) in the URL of a single email message. In reports that came out, the situations between the 7th and 31st of August of such hacking numbered into millions.

Hotmail email's characteristics were always up with the styles. When Google introduced Gmail and an unlimited amount of storage space, Hotmail also followed suit together with competitors like Yahoo in doing the same and more. Hotmail has been integrated with other Microsoft Web Services including Windows Live ID, Live Messenger, Live Spaces, Windows Live Calendar, Windows Live Messenger and social networking websites and programs.

The capabilities that keep Hotmail email up on the email service charts is the ability to look for emails using advanced query syntax, a mouseless navigation option which you can do everything only using keyboard, virus scanning, rich text formatting and signatures. All these characteristics are accessible in 36 different languages around the world. Registered users can have any of the three domain options - live.com, msn.com or hotmail.com. The POP3 facility on Hotmail presents people the facility gain access to their mail on any email websites.