Hotmail Evolves and Zapakmail’s World Record
(Rate this article)
Loading ...
Hotmail has a special connection with most Indians, mainly because of the Sabeer Bhatia connection.
Hotmail was launched on July 4, 1996 and in less than six months, the website attracted over 1 million subscribers. As the interest in the web-based email provider increased, Microsoft eventually took notice and on December 30, 1997, Hotmail was sold to Microsoft for a reported sum of $400 million.
Every Indian techie suddenly wanted to be a Sabeer Bhatia. Hotmail was truly one of the first major successes in the web world (Web 1.0).
Keeping Web 2.0 in mind – Hotmail has evolved. Microsoft has announced the launch of Windows Live Hotmail globally in 36 languages with AJAX and a lot of other cosmetic appeal.
So what’s new?
There’s a Classic View and a Full version
Here are a few features:
The colour of safety:
"We want to make security so simple you don’t even have to think about it. The bar at the top of your message comes in two colors which alert you to suspicious e-mails:
• Red: This means the message appears to be a “phishing” or fraudulent e-mail.
• Yellow: The message is from someone who’s not on your contacts list. (If the "unrecognized sender" is actually a friend of yours, clicking “Mark as Safe” teaches Qwest Mail to always recognize them as a known contact.)"
New AJAXed Look:
There’s also an easy Search facility - which aids in finding old mails. They should have tried to incorporate labels / tags for each mail like Gmail though. That greatly helps in easy reference to old mails.
Live Hotmail also lets you customise the look and feel of your inbox, by letting you choose themes.
Full version is free too. You get drag-and-drop powers of organization, a preview window that lets you see your messages without reloading the page, and a bunch of other stuff.
In the coming weeks, Microsoft will be releasing a new free mail client meant to replace Outlook Express, Windows Mail, and Windows Live desktop. The new client is called Windows Live Mail and will be a desktop client that provides Hotmail’s feature set locally on a users desktop. It will also support management of non Hotmail accounts.
Back in India – ZapakMail has been doing rather well…
Zapak Digital Entertainment has supposedly won itself a world record. On May 4, 2007, the company announced that it had registered around 1,15,263 users for its email service called ZapakMail. This record-breaking number is estimated to be the largest number of registered users recorded by any Web site on a given day.
According to Rohit Sharma, COO, Zapak Digital Entertainment, who confirmed this news, “We plan to roll out our mass media campaign from May 7, 2007 before which we conducted a teaser seeding with our TVC and Virals which has resulted in this disproportionate response. This is by far the highest number of registrations any Web site has garnered on one day. This is the first time a mail service is using 6-7 different creative routes to reach out to the masses and it has paid of for us.”
Well here is a site which pumped in nearly $2 million dollars in advertising and completely exploded the online gaming scene in India. Email was supposed to be an additional service. Zapak hasn’t been able to command too many online gaming addicts yet and I wouldn’t be surprised if their Email service does better than the primary Gaming engagement.
Loading ...
Rediff is a 1000 times better than zapakmail and everyone knows that
Hotmail guys in the process of updating… have delted all my earlier mails OR is it i have not accessed my hotmail account since last 3 months
rediffmail is any day better
None of your mails would be deleted if you are shifting to the live version. You must not have accessed your mail in the last 3 months at all.
And it seems we have quite a few rediff fans/employees here!
Cheers,
Ekalavya
Zapak have misspelt Zindagi as zingagi in their welcome mail….
Small error - but does look shady
zapakmail is disappointing, they have very slow interface due to lack of AJAX, they still have tons of work to do to complete with other mail services.