Goodbye Hotmail! all accounts upgraded to Outlook.com

According to a blog post from Microsoft, all Hotmail accounts now cease to exist. Outlook.com, Microsoft's overhauled email service, completed upgrading about 300 million accounts of its Hotmail email service to the new product.

In the blog post, Outlook group's program manager Dick Craddock reveals that when Outlook.com came out of preview in February, it already had more than 60 million active accounts, but Hotmail was still one of the most widely used services with over 300 million active accounts, making the magnitude of the process incredible. "This meant communicating with hundreds of millions of people, upgrading all their mailboxes - equaling more than 150 million gigabytes of data - and making sure that every person's mail, calendar, contacts, folders, and personal preferences were preserved in the upgrade," Craddock states.

While no email address changes are necessary - Hotmail users can keep their "@hotmail.com" addresses, and no settings on mobile devices need to be changed to access the new email account. Microsoft is turning its energy and attention to future innovation and improvements to Outlook.com with deeper integration with SkyDrive, Microsoft's cloud-based storage service. Features include a single Microsoft account for signing in, a shared contact list and set of connected networks, the ability to send large attachments, and a shared header.