Hotmail: World’s Second Largest Email Provider

Founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith in California in 1996, Hotmail is the world’s second leading email service provider. It was acquired by Microsoft in 1997 and re-launched as MSN Hotmail. Being the second most-preferred email service provider across the globe, Hotmail has over 400 million active users in the world today who uses the email services provided by the company. And, these numbers keep growing by the minute. With so many users and several technological developments these days, it is common for users to face certain technical difficulties. Though there are fewer hotmail problems today as compared to other email service used by people worldwide, most are related to the email services.

Mentioned below are some of the new and improved features that Hotmail provides to its new as well as existing users:

• Using @ to highlight someone’s name in the email – If a user would like to attract someone's attention in an email or a meeting invite, they can simply add the @ symbol before their name in the body of the email or the invite. Not only does this highlight their name in the message or invite, but it also adds them to the ‘To’ column in the email or meeting invite automatically.
• Making traveling easy – Hotmail now helps users to verify and keep a track of their travel reservations using summary cards available in the user’s Inbox and Calendar. It also makes altering hotel and other such reservations convenient, and ensures that the users never miss a flight by sending them regular reminders.
• Making suggestions or giving feedback – in an attempt to prevent any hotmail problems today or in future and to gain maximum user satisfaction, Hotmail now allows its users to suggest new features, give feedback, and vote for future ideas right from their mailbox by going to "File> Feedback> Suggest a Feature".
• Archiving email messages – With the new and improved Hotmail, it is even easier now to archive messages. An email can be archived in a single click by sampling selecting the email and clicking the ‘Archive’ option available on the top of the mailbox. Users can also create designated folders for archived emails.
• Expanded storage – The new version of Hotmail allows 7GB of cloud storage with OneDrive which takes care of one of the major storage hotmail problems today. Because of this feature, users don’t have to worry about sending large attachments either as they can share these simply via OneDrive.
• Adding other email accounts – Users can now add other email accounts to their Hotmail profile. This feature allows Hotmail access to the other email accounts of the users and synchronizing all of them under Hotmail in separate sections. This is extremely efficient and time-saving as it saves users the time additional time that they would have to otherwise spend in singing into all their email account separately. Furthermore, users can directly send an email from their other email accounts without having to log in to them individually.
• Social Media Access – Hotmail now allows users to link their Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts with Hotmail. Users can follow the news feeds and check and reply to messages from their friends on these social media platforms. Microsoft also owns Skype which allows Hotmail users to video chat with their Skype contacts right from their inbox.

Hotmail has been developing and growing its features rapidly to stay in the competition and retain its position in the global market. No wonder, so many users worldwide have been using Hotmail services and the numbers keep increasing regularly.

The writer of this article is highly experienced in the field of technology to technical topics such as new features of email service providers, common email problems, etc.