Outlook not good for Hotmail

SAN FRANCISCO, USA: Microsoft's Hotmail, the free webmail service used by hundreds of millions of people around the world, was phased out last week after Microsoft completed its re-branding to transform it into Outlook.com.

"We're excited to announce that we've completed upgrading all Hotmail customers to Outlook.com," Microsoft's Dick Craddock said in a blog post last week.

"Coupled with the growing organic excitement for Outlook.com, this has pushed us to over 400m active Outlook.com accounts," he said.

The transition began in February, when Microsoft began moving users to the new Outlook.com services.

"Hotmail was still one of the most widely used services, with over 300m active accounts," Craddock said.

"This made the magnitude of the process incredible, maybe even unprecedented. It meant communicating with hundreds of millions of people, upgrading all their mailboxes - equaling more than 150m gigabytes of data - and making sure that every person's mail, calendar, contacts, folders and personal preferences were preserved in the upgrade," he said.

Craddock says the Outlook.com addresses will synchronise with other Microsoft services, such as its Bing search engine and its cloud storage system, Skydrive.

Source: AFP via I-Net Bridge