Microsoft Outlook.com Phases Out Hotmail Boasting Over 40 Million Active Accounts

Microsoft has phased out it' s Hotmail, webmail service, which was used by millions of users. The tech giant started upgrading hotmail to Outlook on February and now the process of migration has been complete.

We're excited to announce that we've completed upgrading all Hotmail customers to Outlook.com," Microsoft's Dick Craddock said in a blog post.
Outlook.com now has over 400 million active user accounts, including 125 million users, accessing email, calendar and contacts on a mobile device using Exchange ActiveSync. Craddock says two new features have been added to the service, incuding SMTP send - which makes it easier to send mail from different email addresses and deeper integration with SkyDrive.

Outlook.com was introduced by Microsoft back in July of 2012, as a preview service. The service came out of preview in February and it already had more than 60 million active accounts.

Dick Craddock wrote "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".

The Outlook's interface is rather a refreshing one, which does have a look and feel Windows 8. Also, Outlook.com is the first email service that is connected to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google. Moreover, back in April, Microsoft announced preview of Skype video calling and messaging for Outlook. The service, which was first made available to a select set of people in the UK and the U.S, will eventually be made available for user around the world.