11 Facts About Hotmail

Hotmail service was founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith, and was one of the first webmail services on the Internet along with Four11's RocketMail .

The name "Hotmail" was chosen out of many possibilities ending in "-mail" as it included the letters HTML, the markup language used to create web pages .

Hotmail initially ran under Solaris for mail services and Apache on FreeBSD for web services, before being partly converted to Microsoft products, using Windows Services for UNIX in the migration path.

Hotmail was sold to Microsoft in December 1997 for a reported $400 million, and it joined the MSN group of services.

Hotmail quickly gained in popularity as it was localized for different markets around the globe, and became the world's largest webmail service with more than 30 million active members reported by February 1999.

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Hotmail originally ran on a mixture of FreeBSD and Solaris operating systems.

In 2002 Hotmail still ran its infrastructure on UNIX servers, with only the front-end converted to Windows 2000.

In 1999, hackers revealed a security flaw in Hotmail that permitted anybody to log in to any Hotmail account using the password 'eh'.

The old MSN Hotmail interface was accessible only by users who registered before the Windows Live Hotmail release date and had not chosen to update to the new service.

Windows Live Hotmail was awarded PC Magazines Editor's Choice Award in February 2007, March 2007, and February 2011.

Hotmail amended its service agreement stating that any account engaging in these activities would be terminated without warning.