History of hotmail

The Hotmail service has gone through tons of changes since 1996. When Hotmail first started, we offered free e-mail with a 2 MB storage limit. Over time, we’ve steadily increased the storage limits to 2GB and 5GB.  Today, we offer ever-growing storage, which means that you essentially never have to worry about storage limits again. (To prevent abuse, we do limit the rate at which you can increase your total storage, but if you add storage at a reasonable rate, you should never hit this limit.) In fact, we have some customers with well over 10GBs of mail in their inboxes.

Hotmail was born on July 4^th, 1996 – the creation of a Silicon Valley startup founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith. It was one of the very first services to offer free web-based e-mail. Originally, Hotmail was spelled “HoTMaiL,” emphasizing its use of HTML for the web user interface. Hotmail became popular quickly, and by the end of 1997 already had millions of customers. Hotmail was acquired by Microsoft late in 1997 and was later integrated with another acquisition –  the web-based calendar service, Jump. Hotmail continued to grow very quickly – reaching tens of millions of users in just a few years. Today, Hotmail has provisioned well over a billion inboxes and has several hundred million active users around the world.

Of course the user interface has changed pretty dramatically, too. Hotmail was the first to offer safety innovations like anti-virus scanning for attachments. We integrated the calendar service, built in a reading pane, and added rules, spell checking, search, web messenger, and lots more.

But over the years we’ve also made dramatic changes to the software that you can’t see. I want to talk a bit about how our software is built and the kinds of changes we’ve made over the years to take advantage of better technology, make our development team more efficient, and integrate Hotmail and Calendar with the rest of the Windows Live services.