Hotmail was originally purchased by Microsoft in 1997, but has since been rebranded, causing some confusion among users. Outlook and Hotmail are effectively the same product, and are one of several little pieces of Microsoft's communication division.

Since 1997, Microsoft has used Hotmail as its primary brand for its emailing service. Hotmail was supposed to become Windows Live Mail for a short time, but a beta test found that the brand did not go down well with users. At the same time, Microsoft was working on rebranding Outlook.com to make it more user-friendly.