Outlook.com
Microsoft free web-based email service
Outlook.com, formerly Hotmail, is a free personal email service offered by Microsoft. It also provides a webmail interface accessible via web browser or mobile apps featuring mail, calendaring, contacts, and tasks services. Outlook can also be accessed via email clients using the IMAP or POP protocols.
Founded in 1995 by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith as Hotmail, it was acquired by Microsoft in 1997 for an estimated $400 million, with it becoming part of the MSN family of online services, branded as MSN Hotmail. In May 2007, the service was rebranded to Windows Live Hotmail, as part of the Windows Live suite of products. It was changed back to Hotmail in October 2011 and was fully replaced by Outlook in May 2013, sharing the same brand as the Microsoft Outlook software which is offered via a Microsoft 365 (formerly Microsoft Office) subscription.
Outlook is offered with any Microsoft account, using the @outlook.com and @hotmail.com domains. Various other domains, including @live.com, @msn.com, @passport.com and @windowslive.com, are maintained but are no longer offered.
History
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).
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Outlook.com” as microsoft free web-based email service. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as microsoft free web-based email service. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q219136. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1995, 1997, 2007 and 2011.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Outlook.com” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.