A new Outlook as Hotmail is declared dead

Hotmail is officially dead having been rebranded as Outlook. Source: AP

MICROSOFT'S Hotmail, the free email service used by hundreds of millions of people, has now been phased out and rebranded as Outlook.com.

"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 late yesterday.

"Coupled with the growing organic excitement for Outlook.com, this has pushed us to over 400 million active Outlook.com accounts."

The transition began in February, when Microsoft began a test of moving users to the new Outlook.com services.

"Hotmail was still one of the most widely used services, with over 300 million active accounts," Mr Craddock said.

"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."

Outlook.com addresses will be better synched to other Microsoft services, such as its Bing search engine and Skydrive, the cloud storage system.

If you have a Hotmail or Hotmail Plus account you don't have to change your address or update any settings on your phone or on other apps.

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