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Hotmail is one of the most used e-mailservices in the world and it is free! Hotmail is offerd by Microsoft and it has more then 200 million users. Below you will find a overview from the history, a small explenation about creating an account and more...

History

In 1996 Jack Smith and Sabeer Bathia launched the website Hotmail. It became extremely succesfull and in 1997 Microsoft bought the e-mailservice for 400 million dollars. Hotmails was created in the first place to show that your e-mail account shouldn't be depending on your internet provider.

Rivals from Hotmail are Yahoo! Mail and Gmail. Gmail provided a inbox with the disk space of 1 GB in april 2007 and now it became even moer. By the time when Gmail offerd the 1GB disk space hotmail only had 2mb disk space.

After 10 years after the launch of Hotmail Microsoft created Windows Live Mail. The change from Hotmail to Windows Live Mail was not been accepted by the user so after a few months they changed the name to Windows Live Hotmail. The update for Hotmail created a new interface and implementation of the AJAX-technology. This new technology was required because the older version of Hotmail became really slow. The main reason for this were the billion accounts; Hotmail couldnt handle these enormous amount of members. In 2008 Microsoft updated Windows Live Hotmail again. They added a few new functions (new theme's and messenger (MSN) was implemented in the browser) with this update Hotmail became a little bit faster again.

Hotmail also offerd a paid account, this is called Hotmail Plus. Hotmail Plus users allows more functions like:

•  You could send bigger attachements
•  No ads
•  Possibility to control your mail through POP

 How to create a account

It is pretty easy to sign up to Hotmail you jsut have to follow the following steps:

• Go to www.hotmail.com.
• In the right corner click on register now.
• You will see a new page and here you could choose what kind of mail you want (@live.com, @hotmail.com etc..)
• When you finished filling in all the forms click on i agree and voila your done! 

The use of Windows Live Hotmail

If you wanna login to your account you just head back to www.hotmail.com, there you will see 2 textboxes where you can put your emailaddres and password. When you logged in you will see the homepage, here you can go to your inbox, spam folder, concepts, sent items and deleted items. When you are in your inbox you see a menu which contains the option to make a new message, create a map/group, reply to massage, delete messages and to print messages

Windows Live Hotmail also contains a function to change the interface to your liking. You can change the colour, size of the text and even the backgrond for your theme.

New searchfunction

In windows Live Hotmail you have a usefull search function. which enables you to search through your emails.
 

Add your Hotmail to Microsoft Outlook

Another way to read your message from your Hotmailaddress is to couple your emailaddres to a program called Outlook, to do this follow these steps:

1. Download Microsoft Outlook.
2. Open Outlook and in the menu open the 'file' files manager.
3. Go to the tab 'E-mail' and press on the button 'new'.
4. Into the popup you see right now check the 'Microsoft Exchange, POP3, IMAP or HTTP' and press next.
5. Insert your name, e-mailaddres and your password and press next again.
6. Outlook then is going to receive your mails, now you could open the mails in your Outlook program and open them on www.hotmail.com.

To export your contactpersons to Outlook you must export them through Windows Live Hotmail (click on the page contactpersons and then on Manage -> export) and then import them through Outlook (in the menu Manage -> import and export)


Problems with Windows Live Hotmail

What do you have to do when you lost your password?

1. The best thing to do first is press 'Forgot My Password' on the login screen from Hotmail.
2. On the next page you must enter your e-mailaddres(= Windows Live ID) and a captcha(picture with images as protection).
3. After this there are different kind of possibilities but you probablby get one of the following 2:
4. 1. You must enter your country and secret question to check your identity.
   2. Or they will send an email with instructions to reset your password.
    
5. If you haven't set a secret question your password will be send to the alternative e-mailadress (that you had to enter when you created your account)

But what if you don't have a secret question and you lost your alternative e-mailaddres? Then you have to contact the Hotmail Staff. You can contect them here, they will help you. 

Alternative

There are alot different alternatives for a hotmailaddres nowadays. You could use other e-mail services like Yahoo! Mail or Gmail. Also you could use the email from your provider or if you have a website you could use the e-mailaddres from your site.