- Hotmail was officially launched on July 4, 1996.
- Hotmail founders: Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith.
- Microsoft bought Hotmail from Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia in December of 1997 for $400 million.
- The Hotmail domain name was chosen because it includes the letters HTML which is the language in which all web pages are written.
- Windows Live Hotmail is the world's largest web-based email service with nearly 364 million users. 2nd and 3rd are Yahoo! Mail (280 million) and Google's Gmail (191 million).
- The Hotmail development and operations groups are based in Mountain View, California.
E-mail facts
- Five percent of Americans have only work e-mail accounts
- Twenty percent of young adults have 3 or more personal e-mail accounts
- 37 percent of American people check their e-mail are at work
- Eighty-one percent of employed Americans have an e-mail account
- 69 percent of American adults still use e-mail for sharing information.
- 109 million Americans received phishing e-mails
- Twenty percent of Americans have not used e-mail yet.
- 50-80 percent of e-mail in Europe is spam
- 56 percent of Internet users send e-mail daily.
