Jack Smith first had the idea of accessing e-mail via the web from a computer anywhere in the world. When Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of names ending in 'mail' and finally settled for hotmail as it included the letters "HTML" - the markup language used to write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casing.
Hotmail was later sold to Microsoft corporation, which rebranded it under its MSN umbrella. Hotmail serves e-mail accounts in many countries. Hotmail is currently the largest webmail provider.
Hotmail allows its members 2MB of free e-mail space, be it sent or received e-mail. Additional space and POP3 access is also available.
See also: List of Wikipedia articles based upon websites