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Your First Hotmail Address

Hotmail launched on July 4, 1996, as one of the first free web email services. Plenty of people still remember the embarrassing address they picked.

current mood: embarrassedcurrently listening to: ♫ the address I picked in eighth grade

Written by Claire Donovan · October 9, 202656k: ~1 min

Hotmail was one of the first free email services you could use from any web browser, launched on July 4, 1996, by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith. It grew to millions of users in its first year, largely because every email it sent carried a little ad inviting people to sign up. Microsoft bought it at the end of 1997, folded it into MSN and eventually turned it into Outlook.com in 2012 and 2013. Old Hotmail addresses still work, and for a lot of people, that first address is a time capsule with a regrettable name.

Email from anywhere

Before Hotmail, most email came from your internet provider, your school or your job. If you changed providers or left school, your address went with it. Hotmail let anyone get a free address that lived on the web, so you could check it from a library, a friend's house or an internet café.

The name was a nod to HTML, the language web pages are written in. Early on it was even written as "HoTMaiL," with the letters H, T, M and L in capitals. Bhatia and Smith picked the Fourth of July for the launch, and the service took off almost right away.

An old desktop computer with a CRT monitor and keyboard — Free email meant you could check it on any computer you could find Photo: ValorosoIT / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

The ad at the bottom of every email

Hotmail's growth came from one simple trick. Every email sent from Hotmail had a line at the bottom inviting the reader to get their own free email at Hotmail, with a link to sign up. An investor had suggested it, and the founders added it after some debate. Years later, Gmail invites spread the same way, one friend at a time.

It worked. Hotmail signed up more than 100,000 people in its first month and about a million in its first six months. Most new users said they'd heard about it from a friend. Every email you sent doubled as an ad for the service to everyone you knew, which is why so many people in the same friend group ended up with Hotmail addresses.

How much storage did Hotmail have?

Early Hotmail accounts came with 2 megabytes of storage. That was enough for a lot of short text emails, but a few attachments could fill it up fast. People deleted old emails to make room, and a "your mailbox is almost full" warning was a regular part of life. Forwarding a big picture or a funny video file to everyone you knew could fill up their inboxes too.

Free accounts that weren't used for a while got shut down. If you forgot to log in for a month or so, you might come back to find your inbox wiped and the account closed. Plenty of people lost their first address that way.

A 3.5-inch floppy disk — A floppy held 1.44 megabytes, so a whole Hotmail inbox was about one and a half of these Photo: Unknown / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

Picking the address

Your first email address said a lot about who you were at, say, thirteen. It usually had a nickname in it, plus a band or a lucky number, and sometimes a lot of x's. Plenty of people still wince remembering theirs, especially when they had to use it on their first job application.

Addresses got longer as the good names got taken, which led to underscores, birth years and random numbers. Picking one was a lot like picking a screen name, and many people used the same one for both.

Microsoft and MSN

On December 31, 1997, Microsoft announced it had bought Hotmail, which had more than 9 million members by then. The price wasn't announced, but reports put it at around $400 million in Microsoft stock. Hotmail became part of MSN, Microsoft's network of websites and services, and it kept growing.

Hotmail also became your login for MSN Messenger. Your contact list was made of email addresses, which meant your Hotmail was basically your username for the whole online world. If you were on MSN Messenger, you probably had a Hotmail account, even if you never opened the inbox.

A row of computers in an internet café — Internet cafés were where plenty of people checked their Hotmail on trips Photo: Unknown / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain

Signatures and stationery

People decorated their emails the same way they decorated their profiles. Signatures had song lyrics, quotes and little pictures made of keyboard characters. Some people used fancy backgrounds and colored fonts that made every email look like a greeting card. Opening an email from a certain friend meant bright purple text on a starry background, every single time.

Your signature said who you were that month, and changing it was a small event. A new favorite band meant a new lyric at the bottom of every message, and friends noticed right away.

Junk mail and chain emails

As Hotmail grew, so did the spam. Inboxes filled with offers nobody wanted, and checking your email meant deleting a pile of junk before you found anything real. Then there were the chain emails from friends and relatives, promising good luck if you forwarded them to ten people and bad luck if you didn't. If you got a lot of chain emails, you probably got them at a Hotmail address.

Video: The Man Who Built Hotmail and Sold it to Microsoft for $400M | Prime Venture Partners — The Man Who Built Hotmail and Sold it to Microsoft for $400M | Prime Venture Partners · Prime Venture Partners
How Hotmail started and why Microsoft bought it. Watch on YouTube

Is Hotmail still a thing?

Hotmail is still a thing in name, and your old Hotmail address still works. In 2012 Microsoft introduced Outlook.com as the new home for Hotmail, and by 2013 every Hotmail account had moved over. You could keep your @hotmail.com address or switch to @outlook.com. Old Hotmail addresses still work today, and you can even still sign up for a new one. The Hotmail name lives on mostly in the addresses people never changed.

Things people remember

The "get your free email" line at the bottom of every message
Mailbox full warnings after one big attachment
Checking email in a computer lab before class
An inbox full of forwards from one aunt
The address you still use for shopping sites so your real inbox stays clean
Logging in after months away and finding everything gone

Better usernames now

Your first email address was a snapshot of who you were. FriendCrib lets you pick a username too, and you can change it if you outgrow it. Make your crib and choose one you won't have to explain on a job application.

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