Hotmail turned 30 years old this month, and the estimated 400 million @hotmail.com addresses created over its lifetime still work, even if most of them have not been logged into in years.
The service launched on July 4, 1996, founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith. The name was a play on the acronym HTML (HoTMaiL), chosen to signal that it was the first free web-based email service accessible from any browser. At the time, most email still required dedicated desktop software like Eudora or Pegasus Mail.
Microsoft acquired Hotmail in December 1997 for approximately US$400 million (about US$780 million or A£630 million today when adjusted for inflation), when it had 8.5 million users. By the time the brand was retired 16 years later, that number had grown past 400 million.
The brand itself disappeared more than a decade ago. Microsoft launched Outlook.com in 2012 and completed the migration of all Hotmail accounts in May 2013. The interface changed, the backend changed, and the name on the door changed, but the accounts themselves survived intact. Every folder, contact, calendar entry and old email transferred automatically. Nothing was deleted. The @hotmail.com addresses simply became aliases within Outlook.com.
This means that hundreds of millions of old inboxes are still sitting on Microsoft’s servers, accessible at outlook.com with the original @hotmail.com credentials. The chain emails from the late 1990s, the early social network invitations, the forgotten mailing list subscriptions, all of it is still there, preserved through the migration.
What has changed is the volume of new mail arriving at those addresses. Spam filters have improved dramatically, and most mailing lists, newsletters and notifications have been redirected to addresses people actually use. For many users, a 30-year-old Hotmail account has become a quiet digital archive, technically active, receiving almost nothing, kept alive by Microsoft’s policy of not deactivating addresses unless an account goes dormant for an extended period.
The underlying platform has also accumulated modern features that did not exist in Hotmail’s heyday: two-factor authentication, Office 365 integration, native calendar and task management, 15 GB of free storage, and advanced spam filtering powered by machine learning. The backend is now fully integrated with Microsoft Entra ID, Exchange Online, OneDrive and Teams.
The old domain still resolves. Typing hotmail.com into a browser redirects to outlook.live.com, as it has for the past 13 years.
Sources: 30 years later, my Hotmail email address still works (TechRadar, June 2026); Outlook.com (Wikipedia)