Well, the end was near an now it’s finally here. Hotmail, as you now know it, is dead. Well, it’s sort of dead as Microsoft has now moved all Hotmail accounts to Outlook.com.
For all those who still have an active Hotmail account will find that their account has been moved to Outlook.com but you can still use your Hotmail email addresses. Microsoft says it now has more than 400 million active accounts on the new well-designed Outlook.com email service.
Microsoft said it migrated 150 petabytes of email in six weeks. The company writes in a blog post:
When Outlook.com came out of preview in February, it already had more than 60 million active accounts. However, Hotmail was still one of the most widely used services, with over 300 million active accounts. This made the magnitude of the process incredible, maybe even unprecedented. This meant communicating with hundreds of millions of people, upgrading all their mailboxes–equaling more than 150 million gigabytes of data–and making sure that every person’s mail, calendar, contacts, folders, and personal preferences were preserved in the upgrade. Of course, this had to be done with a live site experience that was handling billions of transactions a day. With your help, we were able to do all of that in just about 6 weeks. We’ve spent the last few weeks ensuring that everything was completed in line with our high quality expectations.
This is what Hotmail looked like before:
And here is what the new Outlook.com looks like now:
The new Outlook.com will let you use your old Hotmail email addresses. It also allows you to send emails from different accounts getting rid of the “On behalf of” tag.
Apart from the wonderful UI, it also offers a more seemless integration with Microsoft Skydrive.
Time to move on to Outlook.com?
