How many of you know of Hotmail? How many of you are using it? With the advance of the internet, the two top internet searching websites – Google and Yahoo!, their webmail services Gmail and Yahoo! Mail have become preferred online mail services by users around the world. Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail (earlier known as RocketMail) were one of the first webmail sites being active since 1996 and 1997 respectively. But this article here is about the former-mentioned webmail service and the question posed is why is Hotmail considered hot? The answer is quite simple and not at all connected with the literal meaning and specific choice of the word hot.

To those of you who have heard of HTML – this is the main markup language for creating web pages displayable in a web browser. The initials stand for HyperText Markup Language. Back in 1990’s most of the websites were created by using this markup language. Developing a mail service (whether online or not) usually means that the name of the product should include mail in it. What the guys who were working on a name thought was that it would be cool to find a word that includes the letters HT. Their goal was achieved when they named the webmail service Hotmail, or as it was written back then – HoTMaiL. You can see where they were going with this, right? : )

So, the hot name stuck to the service and is still in use more than 15 years after it was picked out. If you’re curious about Hotmail’s history you can find some information about it on wiki.