Email Clients Tutorials
Hotmail Tutorial
Hotmail.com
Hotmail.com is one of the most popular webmail service in the entire world - in addition to an increasing number of features, the fact that Hotmail.com was one of the very first webmail services: Hotmail.com was first available in 1996, and was only purchased by Microsoft a year later, when Hotmail.com was re-branded "MSN Hotmail". Today, the webmail service is officially called "Windows Live Hotmail", but known and referred to by most users simply as "Hotmail". In spite of a growing number of alternate free and paid webmail services, Hotmail.com remains today as the top free email provider, alongside Yahoo! Mail.
Hotmail.com appearance and redesign
The classic version of Hotmail had a look and feel optimized for the browsers of the time, and maintained more or less the same appearance until about 2007. Anyone who signed up for a Hotmail.com account will remember the classic blue look the interface sported:
Today's version of Hotmail.com uses a more "pastel" palette, lighter colors, and can be customized with themes. Much of the original functionality remains there, and layers of new features have been added to the mix. Here is a screenshot of the contemporary Hotmail.com:
Hotmail.com features
The 2005 (was not rolled out until 2007, except to early testers) redesign of Hotmail.com took advantage of the new functionality for which web browsers have added support over the years, and in many respects the new Hotmail.com is closer in experience to a full-fledged email program than the original Hotmail.com, which did not attempt to emulate a desktop email client like Outlook Express or Microsoft Office Outlook.
Hotmail.com now supports drag-and-drop support, so you can simply drag the emails you want into a selected folder, while the original Hotmail.com's approach of using checkboxes still works as well. You can now also use keyboard shortcuts with Hotmail, the same way you can with a regular desktop email program (again, features added to the new Hotmail to take advantage of modern web browsers).
And the modern Hotmail.com experience can be customized to a level much beyond the basic options and settings you could tweak in the original incarnation of Hotmail. The Windows Live team that maintains and upgrades Hotmail is also the same group of people who bring you an email program designed to work seamlessly with the Hotmail service (and does support other email providers as well).
Get your own Hotmail.com account
The next Hotmail tutorials will guide you through the process of creating a new Hotmail.com email account, the Hotmail sign in process, your Hotmail inbox, etc.
While "Hotmail" and "Hotmail.com" remain in use as a legacy, the official name of the service is now "Windows Live Hotmail", the webmail portion of Windows Live's offerings, and the domain name for Hotmail is now "live.com" - something you can see in your web browser's address bar when you are looking at your Hotmail emails (and you can of course still type Hotmail.com to go check your emails).