Outlook.com Transition Complete: Hotmail Is Dead

Microsoft announced today that its slow transition from Hotmail to its new Outlook.com is now complete. Microsoft has replaced its aging Hotmail service with its new Outlook.com email site, moving over some 150 petabytes of emails and information is just six weeks, according to the company. It's now official that Hotmail is dead.

Microsoft also boasts that 400 million users are now using Outlook.com, which seems like a crazy amount of users for such a new service, but it got off to the right foot when over a million users signed up for Outlook.com within the first few hours. Of course, that could've just been to reserve the username that they wanted so that no one else would take it.

Microsoft first launched Outlook.com over the summer last year as a new email service that would eventually replace Hotmail and open the doors for more features to be included. Case in point: Microsoft announced two new features on Outlook.com today. Users now have SMTP available, so it's easier to send email from different email addresses, and there's also deeper integration with SkyDrive.

SkyDrive integration is no surprise, as we knew it was bound to happen at some point, but this will give Outlook.com users the ability to save attachments directly to their SkyDrive, as well as easily attach files to emails that are in SkyDrive. This is essentially the same thing that Google does with their Gmail and Google Drive services. If you want to learn more about Outlook.com, you can check out our hands-on of the service.