What’s the Difference Between Outlook.com, Hotmail.com, Msn.com, and Live.com?

Difference between Outlook.com, Hotmail.com, Msn.com, Live.com What's the difference between outlook.com, Hotmail.com, MSN.com and Live.com? Spoiler... None. Hi everyone, I'm Leo Notenboom for askleo.com. There's a lot of confusion around exactly what these different domains all represent because they've changed dramatically over the years. Heres a question I got not long. Is there no longera Hotmail.com? I'm so confused. I sign into hotmail and it automatically sends me to outlook.com. It would not take my old password so I had to change it. But theres nothing in the account. How do you retrieve information that was in Hotmail.com? This is crazy. How can I get my messages from my old account? Or is this really something that has happened? Is there no longer an MSN Hotmail.com or is this a joke of some kind? It is certainly not a joke. It is very confusing if you're looking at it from that kind It's confusing of historical perspective. The bottom line is that Microsoft is continuing its tradition, if you will, of confusing us with names and name changes. So let's walk through exactly where we are at and how we got here today. Today, they’re all the same All of those domains that I listed, Hotmail, Outlook, MSN, live, and a few more, honestly, they're all the same. In fact, if you go to any of those, you will end up in the same place. You will end up at essentially outlook. com, although even there, the URL that you see in your browser's address bar won't even say that. It'll say something dealing with Live. com dot. But the product that we're all using now online to access our email from any of these Microsoft based accounts is outlook. com. so yes@hotmail. com, doesn't exist anymore in the sense that there is no standalone@hotmail. com site. But it does exist in that your@hotmail. com email address will continue to work and@hotmail. com redirects to outlook. com dot. And the same is true with Live. com comma, webtv. com comma, msn. com, a few other dot coms that Microsoft has offered email addresses on over the years. So the short version, it's all the same. Go to outlook. com comma, log in with your Hotmail email address and your Hotmail password or your other email address that I've just mentioned, any of these domains and the password associated with that, and you're done. You're accessing your email online in outlook. Hotmail begat MSN Hotmail begat Windows Live Hotmail com dot now how did we get here? Well, it's a long, bumpy road. In the beginning, Microsoft purchased@hotmail. com dot. The hotmail at that point was kind of a play on HTML hypertext markup language, which is essentially the language we use to create web pages. Hotmail or HTML mail was then new in the sense that, yeah, you could actually create email. That would be rich. It could have pictures and bold and italics and all that kind of stuff. It was not initially developed by Microsoft. It was developed by somebody else, but Microsoft purchased it. Then after the purchase they started calling it MSN Hotmail because they were in the process of branding a number of their online offerings with this MSN or Microsoft network moniker so that it looked more like a family of products. Of course, MSN really lasts today only as a news portal. The rest of MSN is pretty much gone. Windows Live Hotmail But of course Hotmail survived. It was then renamed Windows Live Hotmail. Again, branding change and nothing more. That basically made it look like it was part of the Windows live family of products that Microsoft was offering at that time. Eventually they said, okay, enough of this hotmail stuff, enough of this MSN stuff, enough of this live stuff. We're going to center on outlook. com. Outlook.com dot outlook. com will be the single place for accessing email online if you've got a Microsoft provided email account, and that's basically how we landed here today, all of your accounts are still there. It's just Outlook. com that you go to to access them. Now the issue, of course, is that, gosh, Hotmail has been around forever. I think my account might very well be well over 20 years old. So the issue then is, well, it's really hard to change our habits. We keep calling it Hotmail even though it has become Outlook. com that we use with our hotmail email address. So you can certainly keep using your@hotmail. com email address or your Msn. com or your web tv or whatever other Microsoft provided email address you're using. I don't believe you can create any of those anymore. I could be wrong. The only thing to be aware of the real big takeaway here is don't be surprised if when you go to those services you end up on Outlook. com, because that's where it's all happening. For updates, for comments, for links related to this topic and more, visit askleo.com/4384. I'm Leo Notenboom and this is askleo.com. Thanks for watching.