Hotmail has changed Microsoft and email forever

Perhaps not even Microsoft expects Hotmail's acquisition of the company in December 1997 to mark the turning point of today's email.

Twenty years ago, on December 29, 1997, Bill Gates brought Microsoft a $ 450 million Christmas gift late, a Sunnyvale-based email startup called Hotmail. By acquiring the company that owns Hotmail with the largest amount of money then, Microsoft has officially entered the world of email on the Web.

Originally introduced in 1996 by Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia as "HoTMaiL" (modified from HTML, the language of the World Wide Web), Hotmail was originally incorporated into Microsoft's MSN online service. Much money has been poured out, mistakes have arisen, the brand is changed, spam becomes legendary, as well as many terrible email signatures have come from here.

But in the years that followed, Hotmail set the tone for all Web-based e-mail services, beginning the era of free email service for users. During the development process, Hotmail made changes in Windows (which later became Windows Server), laying the foundations for the operating system to accelerate operations toward the data center. And this email service is Microsoft's first step towards the Azure cloud service.

Marco DeMello, former chief executive of Microsoft, is now the CEO of PSafe Technology, which has been tasked with integrating Hotmail into MSN's main management program - Microsoft's response to America Online. . DeMello became the director of Windows security and management of Exchange products before leaving Microsoft in 2006, in an interview with Ars. In October 1996, shortly after being hired to manage MSN, He was invited to Redmond to meet Bill Gates. "He has delegated me and the team to search or to create a free Web-based e-mail system for Microsoft," DeMello said.

You have mail! 

In 1996, the web was still luring many followers. Almost all Internet users have access to services such as AOL, MSN, CompuServe and EarthLink. Few are using "high-speed" Internet service over ISDN connections, but many companies do not even connect to their email systems. While there are some Web-based mail providers from ISPs that are integrated within Web-hosting accounts, Lotus introduced the web interface to cc: Mail in 1994.

Hotmail and its competitor Rocketmail (then becoming Yahoo Mail) were first offered free, web-based email sponsored by ads. Prior to 1997, Hotmail had reached 9 million users.

"I made it very clear that we could not build the Web Mail system at the time Bill Gates requested. Buying a new service that is already available is the only practical option now. " To say this, DeMello knew that Microsoft executives often did not like this, they just wanted something "homegrown" to think of themselves bitter experience rather than the source of outsourcing.

Unexpectedly, Mr. Bill wrote a $ 450 million plate for me, and I was given the responsibility to integrate that system and extend it in Microsoft, "DeMello said excitedly.

Control access

This responsibility is a combination of software running on Unix - blended between the FreeBSD web server running above and SPARC Sun Solaris on the back - into the Windows operating system environment, and then migrating to Windows. Server.

Window NT Server did not do this task in 1997. Although DeMello's team has developed several interfaces to the Windows environment based on the Hotmail platform, "We are a Windows Server customer," he said. , "And we did not feel satisfied at the start."

Despite the pressure to immediately transfer code to Windows, DeMello said, "We are struggling in a lot of ways, from security to memory management, and how to manually connect to the TCP network. We were just comparing whether this should be from Unix or NT and that is why we still can not transfer them.

Not to mention at the time, Sun's chief executive, Scott McNealy, used Microsoft's server operating system as a joke in jokes, which in turn rubbed salt into his wounds. Microsoft executives. And to make the change impossible, DeMello's team spent three years developing the Windows 2000 Server system.

DeMello worked with members of the data-mining engineering team and collaborative teams at the time. "The first is about scalability," says DeMello. "It's the information system in the server, the system partitions, the TCP container, the memory, and how it's managed. We also have to study the security of accessing local directories right in the process. And so our team has succeeded. "

The relationship between Microsoft and the Hotmail team has continued for years, especially with the development of IIS, a component of Window's Web and Internet services. "We were able to build tests to test and evaluate IIS - Hotmail. We also know that if it can pass the Hotmail test, you can give it to anyone - it's a very hard test for IIS, "DeMello said. so

Thanks to the operation of Hotmail, Microsoft has had the opportunity to experience on its own, and eventually, when Webmail became a daily global service, the experience that DeMello believes is about. Azure cloud data as of today. This is an infinite variety of information, which helps in detailing what works, not what does not, what works best, what is worst, what works or what does not work. Even from the minute responses to logins, all the ways in which you handle large amounts of information take place quickly.

Although the process of converting data to Windows servers has been around for quite some time, Hotmail's back-end systems - Servers and memory storing databases - have not yet been fully migrated to Windows Server. SQL Server until 2004. The migration of data is getting heavier as the demand for data storage increases, but the speed of migration is limited, data is transferred from this database. to another database and be routed through the data center.

Hotmail has left an Office platform for Microsoft - Outlook itself. The first version of Outlook was released just weeks after Microsoft bought Hotmail. The next version of Outlook 98 was modified to be compatible with Hotmail, which led to a battle of network protocols. DeMello said, "Outlook uses MAPI (the default protocol for Exchange) as the network protocol. DeMello describes MAPI over TCP / IP as one of the most "hard" things ever invented, so we had to change it in order to get back to WebDAV.

Painful experiences and memorable lessons

It took three years to migrate from Solaris to Windows without any problems. DeMello said "The request from Bill Gates is not to lose a mailbox and we have done it. However, there are still some other difficulties.

As we scale the service out to millions of users, central data systems need to be expanded to handle the storage capacity and demand estimates of Hotmail. . Data warehouses are located far away because of cheap prices. "We have to face the cost of hard drives soaring" (this is the time from 1997 to 2000, the cost was really expensive) ... That is when you still have to pay for each Megabyte (forget gigabyte). The cost of infrastructure is astonishing.

Those data centers are expensive and always weak like "hungry". DeMello recalled the time when he and his colleagues completed a new data center, built in Bothell, Washington: "We started testing it. On the first day, we tested Saturn and consequently caused a local power failure at Bothell. As a result, I had to deal with this problem with city officials the next morning, they were very angry. Easy to understand! And we did a second successful test without causing any power failure. The power has been lifted up, everyone is ready and trying their best in the worst case when the whole city is in flames, but fortunately there are no problems. "

Then, in the summer of 1999, Hotmail first suffered a terrible security breach. Each individual account of Hotmail, estimated at 50 million, is at risk of being disclosed due to a bug in the sorting process in Hotmail's server. This error causes: Hotmail email allows access to any Hotmail account with the same password as "eh". 
Web sites spread the way to access mailboxes by simply entering the target account name. Some people have been able to access the accounts through this error nearly two months before Microsoft fixed it. Some people even believe that it is the backdoor left by some developer of Hotmail.

DeMello did not want to comment on the incident, he simply refused: Better to kill me than to make me say. But he also said that Hotmail always need to put security and privacy issues first. "Despite knowing that the settlement was late, he always thought that it was necessary to build the system with the ultimate focus on security and privacy.

In 1999, two particularly important things that Microsoft has done. DeMello and his colleagues have been trying to protect their credentials and offer strict password policies, which also warned users of the need to protect their passwords, also telling them: is not the safest means. Microsoft also warns users never to share or submit personal, financial or confidential information via email.
Hotmail uses HTTP (HTTPS) security with SSL encryption, which protects user and Microsoft login information, forcing users to use more complex characters in their passwords, while the rest of them run over HTTP. encode. "Just having a command that requires us to run the hardware with the maximum acceleration will cost you thousands of dollars for each card you run, whether it's using Unix or Windows Server," DeMello said. You also can not run the entire infrastructure at that time via SSL "

DeMello also added that this has changed with regard to the CPU data system - today we can see: "It is impossible to understand something that can be run with HTTP directly."

The password policy has been set up to prevent customers from using the password too shortly since 2011. Not short but the password is not too long, only 16 characters with Hotmail. Users are also encouraged to place as high a difficulty as possible.

So, if someone is trying to listen to the Wi-Fi network password of the coffee shop, they will not know the password, but it's still possible someone will be able to read your Hotmail message. by stealing web traffic after signing in

The fall of Hotmail

Competition between Google's Gmail and Yahoo forced Hotmail to try harder to stay in the market. Microsoft has made efforts to make MSN more "live" during Microsoft's launch for the Windows Vista project in 2005.

Microsoft also changed its brand to many new services such as "Windows Live", Hotmail has been renamed "Windows Live Mail". However, Hotmail users seem to be quite confused and confused about this so they have renamed again to Windows Live Hotmail. In addition to rebranding, Microsoft has begun rewriting the entire startup system for Hotmail, which originally began with C ++ and Solaris source code. Code rewriting in C # and ASP.NET has stopped the Hotmail Unix effect, perhaps better or worse, as the service becomes the foundation of Microsoft - setting the company to the Office platform. 365 and Azure Cloud as of today.

Although Hotmail is an important factor for Microsoft, it is a testbed of many things, and it is a money-making machine, and sometimes it's scandalous in some places because it's rooted. of the bad things on the Internet. Hotmail users have been causing scandals and boycotts for years. Management consultants have even publicly stated that companies should not hire people who use Hotmail.

Hotmail is the birthplace of accounts that want to set up fake dating records. As the pioneer in HTML email, Hotmail users are a natural target for phishing attacks - phishing. Its spam filtering ability is always suspected. Ironically, Hotmail does not have the ability to prevent spam that causes Hotmail accounts to be blocked as spam accounts - in part because the mailbox is too full.

So even though there are a lot of good features, we do not need to be too mournful for it. Outlook.com makes it easy for people to forget the days of using the old webmail ... and still thousands of people are still very lazy to delete their Hotmail.com address.