Hotmail University • Free Email Help with Windows Live Hotmail.com
HotmailUniversity
Welcome to Hotmail University: free email help with Windows Live Hotmail.com! HotmailUniversity.com provides help for beginners to Hotmail's online email service by Microsoft (webmail), and more advanced topics to help you get the most of Hotmail.com and other MSN services (including Windows Live Mail).
What is Hotmail?
MSN Hotmail, or "Windows Live Hotmail" (and soon to be "Microsoft Hotmail"), is one of the earliest free webmail services, and today the most popular one, followed by Yahoo Mail, and Google's Gmail. Along with these other two email providers, Hotmail offers the easiest way to get a free email address in just a few minutes. Because it is so well known, people will easily remember your email if it ends in "@hotmail.com" or "@live.com" (newer, but gaining popularity).
Should you choose Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, or Gmail?
Our favorite free online email service is Windows Live Hotmail, for several reasons:
- It is completely free but offers a paid "Hotmail Plus" option that removes the ads.
- It is backed by Microsoft, a stable company likely to stay around!
- It is intuitive to beginners (unlike Gmail), and is only updated in a major way now and then (unlike Yahoo Mail, which offers "Classic", "All New", and "Beta" webmail).
- Hotmail now integrates tightly with Facebook (as you'll learn in these tutorials).
- If you are using Windows (vs. Mac OS X or Linux), it makes sense to use a service that tightly integrates with various Windows-only applications, like Windows Live Mail.
- Tip: Microsoft's Windows Live team also makes "Windows Live Mail", a free email program that lets you check your Hotmail account without a web browser!
How does Hotmail work?
Microsoft offers multiple online and email-related services: the core of the Hotmail University website will be Hotmail, or "MSN Hotmail" as it was popularized. Hotmail is a free, "ad-supported" email service: thanks to these revenues, Microsoft can maintain and upgrade its Windows Live Hotmail webmail service and the Windows Live Mail email program. You can also pay a yearly subscription fee (US $19.95 per year) to hide the ads by - it removes the ads and gives you more features.
"Hotmail" vs. "Live"
To clarify some confusion, Microsoft offers free email addresses around the world, which is why you may see people with email addresses ending in "@hotmail.com" (US) or "@hotmail.co.uk" (United Kingdom), etc. - this is an easy way to get the email account you want if it is already taken in another version. Since it started the "Windows Live" concept (free software and services for Windows users - and Mac), Microsoft introduced "@live.com" email addresses as well - so if someone uses a Live.com email address, they are still using the Hotmail service like everyone else who has an email account that contains "@hotmail" somewhere.