What's the difference between MSN, Hotmail, Outlook & Windows Live Mail?

What are the MSN, Hotmail, Outlook and Windows Live Mail?

MSN (acronym of The Microsoft Network) is a web portal and related collection of Internet services. It is an app for Windows and mobile devices, provided by Microsoft.

Hotmail is a free online e-mail service set up by Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia in 1995 that was later acquired by Microsoft in December of 1997. It allows users to read and to send e-mail using internet connection.

Outlook is a program bundled with Microsoft Office. Thanks to it, users can read and manage email, calendars, contacts, etc. on their own computers. In fact, Outlook is not an email service but a program to fetch emails for you. However, Outlook.com, a website rather than a program like Outlook. It provides free webmail with individual Microsoft Accounts and provides email, calendar, and contact functions.

Windows Live Mail is a desktop email program which was first introduced by Microsoft to replace Outlook Express. It is part of the Windows Essentials suite, including such programs as Live Mail, Live Writer, Photo Gallery, MovieMaker, and OneDrive. (It used to include Messenger, which was replaced by Skype).

What is the difference between MSN, Hotmail, Outlook, and Windows Live Mail?

Live Mail and Outlook.com are fundamentally identical.  If you log into https://mail.live.com/ or https://www.outlook.com/ using the same Microsoft ID, you should see the same mailbox, but possibly with a different user interface.

With your Hotmail account, you can use Outlook without a new account or even no changes in username/password.

Whether you already upgrade your Hotmail account or not, your email will always work.

All Microsoft mailboxes ending with @outlook.com, @live.com, @hotmail.com, @msn.com will or already be migrated to the current Outlook.com platform hosted on the Office 365.

Microsoft has announced that those email services including Hotmail, Live Mail, and MSN Mail will be ended and suggests their users transfer into some other free Mail apps or Outlook service -  a Microsoft Office’s email and personal information. Even though Outlook users will be charged, they could be offered one year free Office 365 from Microsoft.

After one year of using Outlook, users will be charged additional £59.99 per year for Office 365 Personal. The package includes all services of Microsoft Office plus a 1TB free online storage.

Alternatively, you could pay a lump sum of £164 for a permanent using package of Microsoft Office Home and Business 2016 or Microsoft Office Outlook 2016.

The Mail app is simpler but less powerful than Windows Live Mail. It has limited options for sorting emails and sending emails to groups. Outlook is far more powerful than Windows Live Mail. It has more advanced features for emails, contacts, calendars, and to-do lists.