Hotmail
From ArticleWorld
Hotmail is a free webmail service maintained by Microsoft and a major competitor in the free e-mail field. It earned an important place in the e-mail world, along with the likes of Gmail, Yahoo! Mail or AIM Mail.
Hotmail was launched commercially on July 4 1996, as a symbol of freedom from ISPs. The idea was to launch an e-mail service accessible anywhere, through a simple web browser, in order to get past the restrictions imposed by corporate firewalls that were not allowing ordinary e-mail traffic. Hotmail achieved a great deal of popularity, with more than 8 million subscribers in 1997, when it was purchased by Microsoft.
Features
Hotmail offers a 250 MB disk quota with a 10 MB attachment limit at account activation for users in US, Canada, UK, Brazil, Spain and Australia. Users from other countries initially have a 10 MB inbox, but the size is later increased to 250 MB, a solution with much controversy. An increased amount of space (2 GB with 20 MB attachment limit) is available, but for a fee.
Even though there is no POP3 support available, users can check their e-mail using Microsoft's Outlook programs, Microsoft Entourage or using Mozilla Thunderbird with an extension. In 2004, Microsoft announced that this would become subscription-based, but, even at the time of writing, free users can still benefit from this feature.
Starting from 2004, Hotmail also offers country-specific domains. This was also done because many @hotmail.com addresses were already taken, due to the high number of subscribers.
The OS debate
In 1998, Hotmail was known to use Solaris and BSD operating systems, a fact regarded with much amusement by the anti-Microsoft community. Even in 2001, a significant number of servers were still running open-source software.
This was not the only source of sarcasm from more experienced users. Not all web-based functions are provided on non-Microsoft browsers. More precisely, the right-click context menu is not available, which was the source of significant criticism.