Hotmail

Email Serivces- Hotmail


Windows Live Hotmail from Microsoft is a very popular email service and was one of the first to create this service alongside Yahoo! Mail and Outlook.It offers both free email accounts and hotmail plus which costs to use. Simply known as "Hotmail" when it was launched in July 1996, it was acquired by Microsoft in December 1997 with its 8.5 million subscribers. Under Microsoft, the email service got a tremendous boost and became the number one provider because of its advanced and stylish layout. 'Hotmail' also grew in popularity with younger people because of MSN Messenger becoming popular. 
 
Now however, their is more competition than ever, and Windows Live Hotmail as its now known has stiff competition from Yahoo! Mail and the entrance of Gmail with its 1GB free email accounts and loads of free useful features has seen Hotmail decline in users. 



















Hotmail has introduced a 'clean out your inbox' feature. This includes a 'sweep' feature which deletes unwanted emails. Also windows 'SmartScreen technology' prevents junk mail from arriving in your inbox. 







Hotmail features compared with competitors


The following is the list of some of the important features of the free email accounts from Windows Live Hotmail service and how they help the user have a better email experience: 

• Hotmail has 5GB storage space for email messages. This is unfortunately still less than 7.2GB which each Gmail user possess . However Yahoo! Mail account users enjoy unlimited inbox space, this is a huge advantage for Yahoo as business customers regularly use email as a means of contact and receive and send numerous emails. This require lots of email space, and Yahoo offers this. 

• The Attachment size is only 10MB which is half of Gmail's 20MB. This means that Gmail users can share larger files than users of Hotmail. This is important for poeple who want to share videos, and buisness presentations which are of a large file size. Even if people dont use this feature or don't require 20MB attachment size it still poses a better feature than a competitor so people are more likely to use Gmail as their email client rather than Hotmail.

• Forwarding: Emails can be forwarded to accounts in the Microsoft domain like others accounts at Hotmail.com or Live.com.This is useful if you want to interchange between programs or want to send an email to another program. 

• Virus scanning and security: All email clients have a policy to scan incoming emails and attachments for worms and viruses. Windows Live Hotmail uses Trend Micro virus scanning, this is a comprehensive featrure that works perfectly and since i have used Hotmail i have not received any viruses or worms from emails or attachments.