P.S. I love you

Read to the end

Go back almost three decades, and if you were alive already, and if you were using email, you were almost certainly paying for the privilege.

Maybe you were sending emails from AOL or CompuServe or another subscription service. Or else, maybe your emails were tied to your work or your school, or another organization.

The one thing I can guarantee you weren’t doing was using a web-based email service like Gmail or Outlook, or even Protonmail.

The reason? None of them existed yet, and so you were held captive.

If you decided you wanted out, you lost all your email history.

All of that changed in July 1996, when Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith, who had worked together at Apple, launched the first web-based, free email service: Hotmail.

I’m dating myself because I’m pretty certain I had a Hotmail email address before the year was out, and I’m also almost certain I was prompted to join because someone had sent me an email from a Hotmail account, which by default contained a 6-word signature provided by Hotmail itself.

The signature read simply: “Get your free email at HoTMaiL.”

Click on it, and you went directly to the Hotmail signup page.

Sounds pretty basic, right? But somebody had to come up with the idea first, and several accounts say it was Bhatai and Smith who were the pioneers.

They launched on July 4 that year, because they wanted to symbolize “freedom” from Internet service providers, along with the idea that anyone could log into their email account anywhere in the world.

But they needed users. Celebrating over lunch after their launch, they tracked 100 new registrations in the first hour, 250 by the end of the day.

As TechCrunch reported a full 16 years ago, getting much of the story from a book called Viral Loop: From Facebook To Twitter, How Today’s Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves, “Growth was robust but not staggering.”

At their next meeting with their VC firm (this was 1996, after all), Draper Fisher Jurvetson, key investor Tim Draper pushed them on how they planned to get the word out.

Ideas included things like billboards and radio ads. But that seemed like a lot of advertising spend for something that was essentially a free product.

So Draper suggested they should a tagline to every outgoing email — something like, “P.S. I love you. Get your free email at Hotmail.”

Bhatia and Smith hesitated, but agreed a day later — without the “P.S. I love you" part. Within hours, “Hotmail’s growth took on the shape of a classic hockey stick curve.”

• 3,000 new users per day

• 750,000 users by Labor Day

• 2 million users by Halloween

All without spending a penny.

In fact, Bhatia sent a single email from Hotmail to a friend in India and within three weeks Hotmail had 100,000 signups in that country. They also (according to TechCrunch) became the largest email provider in Sweden without spending a penny.

A year and a half after launch, Microsoft bought Hotmail for a reported $400 million. It was rebranded as MSN Hotmail for several years, and rolled into Microsoft’s Outlook.com email program a decade and a half later.

Sure, you probably have to have at least a bit of gray hair now to remember the early days of something like Hotmail, but it endures.

In fact, inspired by this bit of history, I went into the dashboard for this newsletter to figure out how many people are still using it. Here are the top 10 email domains among Understandably users:

1. gmail.com 50.85%

2. yahoo.com 12.23%

3. hotmail.com 6.51%

4. aol.com 3.33%

5. icloud.com 2.18%

6. outlook.com 1.39%

7. comcast.net 1.37%

8. msn.com 1.12%

9. me.com 0.77%

10. sbcglobal.net 0.56%

Gmail dominates, but it's kind of nice to see all those old souls out there, including the Hotmailers among us.

Thanks for reading.

P.S. I love you.

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7 other things worth knowing

• As the controversy over his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy financier and sex offender, has refused to dissipate, President Trump and those closest to him have tried repeatedly to divert attention to other subjects -- everything from threatening to arrest former President Obama to demanding that the Washington Commanders and Cleveland Indians change their names back to "Redskins" and "Indians." So far, nothing has worked. “Nobody turns the page better than Donald Trump,” said Republican strategist Alex Conant. “This is different because he’s in a real fight with his base." (The Washington Post)

• Related: Speaker Mike Johnson arranged to shut down the House of Representatives early for the summer in order to head off Democrats’ calls for votes for greater transparency into the Epstein investigation. Mr. Johnson said the House would adjourn Wednesday and cancel all business until September, avoiding a politically perilous vote on an issue that has fractured Mr. Trump’s base. (The New York Times)

• Days after drawing backlash from Californians for criticizing the state where her family made its fortune and discussing her impending move to Tennessee, Lynsi Snyder, the billionaire heiress and president of In-N-Out Burger, insisted on Instagram that In-N-Out won't move its corporate headquarters. Critics accuse Snyder, whose estimated net worth is $7.3 billion, of leaving the state in search of lower tax rates. Tennessee's top corporate tax rate is 6.5%; California's is 8.84%. (CNBC)

• Experiencing financial strife is a nightmare of many Americans, but it appears to be a looming reality for Texans, according to a just-released WalletHub study ranking Texas the No. 1 most financially distressed state in America. (Culturemap)

• Heavy metal star Ozzy Osbourne has died aged 76, just weeks after reuniting with his Black Sabbath bandmates and performing a huge farewell concert for fans. They went on to become one of the most influential and successful metal bands of all time, selling more than 75 million albums worldwide. (Sky News)

• Hurricane risk in Florida is escalating. Home insurance is harder to get. Rising insurance costs signal the deep impacts of climate change in west Florida as communities grapple with recurring damage and costly recoveries. (NBC News)

• The largest piece of Mars ever found on Earth was sold for just over $5 million at an auction of rare geological and archaeological objects in New York last week. The 54-pound rock named NWA 16788 was discovered in the Sahara Desert in Niger by a meteorite hunter in November 2023, after having been blown off the surface of Mars by a massive asteroid strike and traveling 140 million miles (225 million kilometers) to Earth, according to Sotheby’s. (WTOP)

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Mariia Shalabaieva on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.