Outlook.com

Outlook.com is a free web-based email service run by Microsoft. One of the world's first webmail services, it was founded in 1996 as Hotmail (stylized as HoTMaiL) by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith in Mountain View, California and headquartered in Sunnyvale. It was acquired by Microsoft in 1997 for an estimated $400 million and launched as MSN Hotmail, later rebranded to Windows Live Hotmail as part of the Windows Live suite of products. The last version was released in 2011. As of 2011, Hotmail had 360 million users per month. It was available in 36 different languages. In 2013, Hotmail was replaced with Outlook.com, which features Microsoft's Metro design language, and closely mimics the interface of Microsoft Outlook. It also features unlimited storage, Ajax, and integration with Calendar, OneDrive, People and Skype.

Launch of 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 (later Yahoo! Mail). It was commercially launched on July 4, 1996, symbolizing "freedom" from ISP-based email and the ability to access a user's inbox from anywhere in the world. 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 (to emphasize this, the original type casing was "HoTMaiL"). The limit for free storage was 2 MB. Hotmail was initially backed by venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. By December 1997, it reported more than 8.5 million subscribers. Hotmail initially ran under Solaris for mail services and Apache on FreeBSD for web services before being partly converted to Microsoft products.

MSN Hotmail


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. Hotmail originally ran on a mixture of FreeBSD and Solaris operating systems. A project was started to move Hotmail to Windows 2000. In June 2001, Microsoft claimed this had been completed; a few days later they retracted and admitted that the DNS functions of the Hotmail system were still reliant on FreeBSD. In 2002 Hotmail still ran its infrastructure on UNIX servers, merely the front-end was converted to Windows 2000. Later development saw the service tied with Microsoft's web authentication scheme, Microsoft Passport (now Microsoft account), and integration with Microsoft's instant messaging and social networking programs, MSN Messenger and MSN Spaces (now Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Spaces, respectively).

Security issues
In 1999 hackers revealed a security flaw in Hotmail that permitted anybody to log into any Hotmail account using the password 'eh'. At the time it was called "the most widespread security incident in the history of the Web". In 2001, the Hotmail service was compromised again by computer hackers who discovered that anyone could log into their Hotmail account and then cull messages from any other Hotmail account by crafting a URL with the second account's username and a valid message number. It was such a simple attack that by the time the patch was made, dozens of newspapers and hundreds of web sites published exact descriptions allowing tens of thousands of hackers to run rampant across Hotmail. The exploitable vulnerability exposed millions of accounts to tampering between August 7, 2001 and August 31, 2001.

Competition
In 2004, Google announced its own mail service, Gmail. Featuring greater storage space, speed, and interface flexibility, this new competitor spurred a wave of innovation in webmail. The main industry heavyweights – Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail – introduced upgraded versions of their email services with greater speed, security, and advanced features.

Windows Live Hotmail
Microsoft's new email system was announced on November 1, 2005, under the codename "Kahuna", and a beta version was released to a few thousand testers. Other webmail enthusiasts also wanting to try the beta version could request an invitation granting access. The new service was built from scratch and emphasized three main concepts of being "faster, simpler, and safer". New versions of the beta service were rolled out over the development period, and by the end of 2006 the number of beta testers had reached the millions.

The Hotmail brand was planned to be phased-out when Microsoft announced that the new mail system would be called Windows Live Mail, but the developers soon backtracked after beta-testers were confused with the name change and preferred the already well-known Hotmail name, and decided on Windows Live Hotmail. After a period of beta testing, it was officially released to new and existing users in the Netherlands on November 9, 2006, as a pilot market. Development of the beta was finished in April 2007, Windows Live Hotmail was released to new registrations on May 7, 2007, as the 260 million MSN Hotmail accounts worldwide gained access to the new system. 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. The roll-out to all existing users was completed in October 2007.

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

In 2008 it was announced that the service would be updated with focus on improving the speed, increasing the storage space, better user experience and usability features, and that sign-in and email access speeds would be up to 70 percent faster. The classic and full versions of Windows Live Hotmail were combined in the new release. As a result of user feedback, Hotmail was updated so that scrolling works for users who have the reading pane turned off. It was also expected that Hotmail team would be moving the advertisement from the top of page to the side, adding more themes, increasing the number of messages on each page and adding the ability to send instant messages from the user's inbox in future releases.

Support for Firefox in the upgraded Windows Live Hotmail took a few months to complete. Full version support for Google Chrome was also added on November 4, 2008.

As part of the update, Microsoft also added integrated capability for instant messaging with contacts on the Windows Live Messenger service. The feature is the realization of a project that began as "Windows Live Web Messenger" in 2007, a replacement for the outdated "MSN Web Messenger" service that was first launched in August 2004. It was noted that the original "Windows Live Web Messenger" featured tabbed conversations in a "conversation workspace", however since its integration with Hotmail this has been removed.

On May 18, 2010, Microsoft unveiled the "Wave 4" update of Hotmail, which offered features such as 1-click filters, active views, inbox sweeping, and 10 GB space for photos, Microsoft Office documents, and attachments. It also included integration with Windows Live SkyDrive and Windows Live Office, a free version of Microsoft's Office Web Apps suite. The new version began its gradual release to all Hotmail users on June 15, 2010 and was completely rolled out on August 3, 2010. Exchange ActiveSync support was enabled to all Hotmail users on August 30, 2010, allowing users to sync their mail, contacts, calendar and tasks to their mobile devices that supports the protocol. Addition of full-session SSL was released on November 9, 2010.

Throughout 2011, Microsoft added several new features to Hotmail, such as aliases and speed improvements. In October 2011, Microsoft unveiled a "re-invented Hotmail", and added many new features such as Instant Actions, scheduled Sweep, and Categories  and this update began fully rolling out on November 9, 2011. This update also made SSL enabled by default on all accounts.

Transition to Outlook.com
Outlook.com was first introduced on 31 July 2012 when its beta version was made available to the general public. Existing Hotmail customers could freely upgrade to the preview version of Outlook.com and downgrade back.

Outlook.com graduated preview stage on 18 February 2013. According to Microsoft, existing Hotmail users have been forcibly upgraded to Outlook.com on April 3, 2013 while retaining their @hotmail.com or @live.com email address, password, messages, folders, contacts, rules, vacation replies, etc. and will have the option of having an @outlook.com email address.

As of May 2013, Outlook.com had 400 million active users.

Features
Similar to other major webmail services, Outlook.com uses Ajax programming techniques and supports later versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Google Chrome. Some of its features include keyboard controls giving the ability to navigate around the page without using the mouse, the ability to search the user's messages including structured query syntax such as "from:ebay", message filters, folder-based organization of messages, auto-completion of contact addresses when composing, contact grouping, importing and exporting of contacts as CSV files, rich text formatting, rich text signatures, spam filtering and virus scanning, support for multiple addresses, and different language versions.

In comparison to other webmail services, Outlook.com offers the following unique features:

Privacy
Outlook.com has promised to respect user's privacy, specifically targeting Gmail's privacy practices. Outlook.com does not scan emails or attachments for advertising information and personal conversations are ad-free entirely.

Active View
Outlook.com's Active View allows users to interact directly with contents and functionality within their email message. For example, any photo attachments can be previewed directly using Active View. In addition, Outlook.com provides a partner platform which allows contents and functionality from various websites and services such as YouTube, Flickr, LinkedIn, and United States Postal Service to be viewed directly within the email message. For example, users may view the YouTube video within Outlook.com when a user receives an email which contains a link to the video. Other Active View features include tracking of real time shipping status from United States Postal Service and performing social networking actions on LinkedIn or other social networking sites directly from within the email message.

Office Web Apps integration
Outlook.com integrates with Office Web Apps to allow high fidelity viewing and editing of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents that are attached to the email messages. Users can directly open attached Office documents within the web browser, and save them into their OneDrive. Users can also perform edits to any received Office documents, and directly reply to the sender with the edited version of the document. In addition, users may also send up to 25 GB of Office documents (up to 50 MB each) using Outlook.com by uploading these documents onto OneDrive, and share these documents with other users for viewing or collaboration.

Conversation threading
Outlook.com provides the ability to automatically group sent and received emails that are from the same conversation into the same conversation thread, allowing users to quickly browse through all the emails within the same conversation thread. This feature can be turned on or off depending on the user's preferences.

Sweep
Outlook.com offers a "virtual broom" which allow users to delete or move large amounts of emails into specified folders based on the sender's information. Once a "sweep" is performed, the user may choose to configure Outlook.com to remember the sweep settings and perform the same move or delete actions for any future emails. Users may also set up custom message rules based on the sender's or recipient's information, the subject of the email, or attachments to the email. There is also an option to delete/move messages that are older than a specified amount of days, or only keep the latest message from a sender.

Quick views and one-click filters
Quick views allow users to filter all emails (in all folders) by document attachments, photo attachments, flagged messages, or shipping updates. One-click filters allow users to filter the inbox (or specific folder) based on whether or not the email message is unread, from the People service list, from group mailing lists or Windows Live Groups, or from a social networking website. Categories appear under quick views for ease of access.

Aliases
Users can create additional, unique email addresses, called aliases, for their Microsoft account. As of April 17, 2013, users can now sign in with any alias and create up to 10 aliases per year for a total of up to 10 addresses. For a given account, all aliases uses the same inbox, contact list, and account settings—including password—as the primary address. Once an alias is set up, users can choose to have all email sent to that address go to the inbox, or to a different folder. Emails sent from an alias do not reveal to recipients that they come from an account with other addresses.

Custom Domains
Users can use their own domain names with their Outlook.com account.

Categories
Categories allow users to label messages or senders into a particular group, and those categories will appear under "Quick views" in the sidebar. Some categories are created by default, and some mail is put in those categories by default (e.g. photos, office docs and newsletters). Users can select multiple categories for each piece of mail, have categories applied automatically, and create new ones.

Instant actions
Instant actions are buttons that appear when a user hovers the mouse over a message. Examples of instant actions are delete, move, sweep, and flag, and they are customizable in options.

Registration
Upon registration, new users can choose from an Outlook.com domain address (@hotmail.com, @live.com, @msn.com and @outlook.com).

Single-use code
A single-use code is a code that can be used instead of a user's password when signing into a Microsoft account. Each code can be used only one time, but one can be requested whenever needed. If a user is signing in on a public computer—such as at the library or school—using a single-use code helps keep account information secure. The single-use code is sent to the user when requested during login.

Security
Outlook.com uses DMARC specifications to provide better security for message transmission and Extended Validation Certificate to secure the user's connection with Outlook.com.

On April 17, 2013, Microsoft added two step verification.

Skype integration
A preview version of Skype for Outlook.com started rolling out in the UK on April 30. This feature allows users to make a Skype video call within Outlook.com without using the Skype desktop client.

Localization
The user interface of Outlook.com has been localized into 98 languages and locales to date.

Ad-free Outlook.com

 * Notes:
 * A. 7 GB with OneDrive

POP3
POP3 access has been made available for all Hotmail accounts as part of the "Wave 3" release, adding support to access Hotmail from any email client—most notably mobile devices.

WebDAV
WebDAV, which was primarily used by Outlook Express, was discontinued on September 1, 2009.

DeltaSync
For access through Microsoft Outlook 2003, 2007, or 2010, users can download the free Microsoft Outlook Hotmail Connector. Using the Outlook connector, users can freely access email messages, contacts, and calendars in any Outlook.com account, though access to tasks and notes requires a premium subscription. Another alternative for users is to use the Windows Live Mail desktop client, which had built-in support for Hotmail. Both applications, Windows Live Mail and Microsoft Outlook, access Outlook.com through the proprietary DeltaSync protocol.

Exchange ActiveSync
As part of the Hotmail "Wave 4" release, Microsoft added Exchange ActiveSync support to Hotmail, allowing users to synchronise their email, contacts, and calendar on any device that supports the Exchange ActiveSync protocol.

Android
Push email, contacts, and calendar are available for Android users by an Android app developed by Microsoft.

IMAP
IMAP support was announced on September 12, 2013.

Spam policy and filtering
Like many free Webmail services, Hotmail was often used by spammers for illicit purposes such as junk or chain mailing and unwanted marketing, due to wide availability, service popularity, and ease of registration of new accounts. However, Hotmail did not tolerate this practice. It subscribed to Microsoft's service agreement, which stated any account engaging in these activities would be terminated without warning.

US government surveillance
According to theguardian.com, several top-secret internal NSA newsletters indicate that Microsoft has allowed NSA to access chats and emails on Outlook.com, and implemented a bypass of its advertized encryption in order to facilitate government access.


 * One newsletter entry dated December 26, 2012 shows that Microsoft had "developed a surveillance capability to deal" with the interception of encrypted chats on Outlook.com, within five months after the service went into public testing.
 * Another entry states that "[f]or Prism collection against Hotmail, Live, and Outlook.com emails will be unaffected because Prism collects this data prior to encryption".

In response to the report, Microsoft stated, among other things, that "[w]hen we upgrade or update products we aren’t absolved from the need to comply with existing or future lawful demands" and that "[t]here are aspects of this debate that we wish we were able to discuss more freely".