Hotmail celebrates 10th birthday

Hotmail, the popular web-based email service from Microsoft's MSN division, is ten years old.

According to MSN there are now some 270 million active accounts worldwide, 8.8 million of which are in the UK. In 1996, the year it started, there were only 56,000 people signed up to the service.

According to MSN, a billion emails a day arrive in Hotmail inboxes. Given recent figures that suggest nearly 90 per cent of all email sent is spam, it's safe to assume that many of these messages are unsolicited.

Stuart Anderson, the marketing manager of Hotmail, said: "The growth of Hotmail over the last 10 years has been phenomenal, starting with our first sign-up in 1996 to now hosting over 270 million accounts globally."

Early next year the next generation of Hotmail, Windows Live Mail, will arrive. MSN is promising a more advanced service that will be "faster, simpler and safer" than Hotmail.

"The future of email is certainly bright and our plans for Windows Live Mail will see a whole new era of webmail over the next decade," said Anderson.

http://www.hotmail.com/

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