This article is about the public webmail service. For the business webmail service, see Outlook on the web . Outlook.com Outlook Mail inbox in Outlook.com with Skype sidebar open Type of site Webmail , contacts , tasks , and calendaring Available in 106 languages Owner Microsoft Website outlook .com Alexa rank 5,891 (December 2016) [1] Commercial Yes Registration Required Users 400 million [2] Launched July 4, 1996 ; 20 years ago (as Hotmail) July 31, 2012 ; 4 years ago (as Outlook.com) Current status Online Content license Proprietary Outlook.com is a web-based suite of webmail , contacts , tasks , and calendaring services from Microsoft . One of the world's first webmail services, [3] it was founded in 1996 as Hotmail (stylized as HoTMaiL ) by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith in Mountain View, California , and headquartered in Sunnyvale . [4] [5] Microsoft acquired Hotmail in 1997 for an estimated $400 million and la