Microsoft has announced that it is officially killing Hotmail 16 years after launching the service. Say goodbye forever to your first email account/whatever accounts you made to sign up for porn sites.

While what comes before the @-symbol may include the letters and characters you picked out, what comes after it still says a whole lot about you. A new study breaks down the types of people that use different types of free email services.

According to Microsoft, one in five email messages is a status update from a social networking site. To help you deal with that, they are teaching you how to turn off email updates. No! Wait! They are revamping Hotmail.

The bad news is that 30,000 Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, and other email accounts have had all their login info posted online, by hackers. The good news is, it's their own dumb fault.

Sometimes I hear people ask: "Who uses Yahoo Mail anymore?" The answer, of course, is just about everybody. ComScore puts the number at around 260 million people — far more than Google's 90 million. But statistics can feel abstract. Now that a 4chan reprobate has hacked into Alaska governor and "average hockey mom" Sarah Palin's private Yahoo email account and discovered, among other things, her contact list, we have a more concrete demonstration of Yahoo's dominance of Palin's decidedly down-home demographic. Here is a list contains six Yahoo addresses, an AOL address, a Hotmail address and exactly zero Gmail addresses.Sarah Palin's contact list: Beth Leschper (Beth Leschper SOA) [Edit] [redacted]@alaska.gov Blanche Kallstrom (Blanche) [Edit] [redacted]@starband.net Bristol Palin (Bristol) [Edit] [redacted]@hotmail.com Chuck Heath (Chuck) [Edit] [redacted]@yahoo.com [redacted]@yahoo.com (Todd) [Edit] [redacted]@yahoo.com (Frank) [Edit] Heather Bruce (Heather) [Edit] [redacted]@gci.net [redacted]@alaska.gov (Ivy SOA) [Edit] [redacted]@yahoo.com (Ivy Personal) [Edit] Judy Patrick (Judy Patrick) [Edit] [redacted]@mtaonline.net [redacted]@alaska.gov (Kris Perry SOA) [Edit] [redacted]@yahoo.com (Kris Personal) [Edit] [redacted]@yahoo.com (Molly) [Edit] Roseanne Hughes (Roseanne Hughes SOA) [Edit] [redacted]@alaska.gov Sally Heath (Mom) [Edit] [redacted]@mtaonline.net Sean Parnell (Sean Personal) [Edit] [redacted]@alaska.com Sharon Leighow (Sharon SOA) [Edit] [redacted]@alaska.gov [redacted]@aol.com (Sharon Leighow Personal) [Edit] Track Palin (Track) [Edit] [redacted]@hotmail.com

The latest report from the Pew Internet survey machine says, "69 percent of online Americans use webmail services, store data online, or use software programs such as word processing applications whose functionality is located on the Web." What they really mean is: A lot of people use Hotmail. But while the 69 percent number overstates the case, there are some surprising stats in the details:

Sabeer Bhatia, the Hotmail founder who gleaned a cool $400 million in the email startup's sale to Microsoft, got married this year to the gorgeous Tanya Sharma, heiress to the Baidyanath Group fortune. This picture of the bride and groom from the nuptials held on "the exclusive Malaysian Island of Langkawi" was published by our new favorite anonymous blogger covering the Indian tech and outsourcing scene who promises further dish. Have a better caption? The best one will become the new headline. Yesterday's winner: "I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do." by kadedworkin.

Yesterday morning, Microsoft's Hotmail and many other Windows Live services were knocked offline, but came back after a few hours. Tonight, I tried to go to hotmail.com and got the above error message after more than a dozen redirects.

Microsoft's Hotmail is down in the Northeast. Other Microsoft websites are sporadically reachable but extremely slow for many users. I'm located in Boston and cannot connect to Hotmail or Live.com. The MSN network status page for Hotmail claims there are no network issues at this time, but that's clearly incorrect. This is the second major service outage this week, following Pakistan's takedown of YouTube over the weekend. Is Hotmail down for you? Let us know in the comments. A Microsoft's flack's PR-speak comment is below.

VC blogger Fred Wilson gives Google and Yahoo too much credit: He's taking their "Inbox 2.0" initiatives to turn Gmail and Yahoo Mail into social networks seriously. He 's put together a chart comparing the "social graphs" — we think he means "number of users" — of some popular social networks versus Microsoft's Hotmail and AIM.com. Wilson estimates that Yahoo and Google, which aren't actually on the chart, have about 250 million and 60 million users. Here's the chart.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer slams Google because they "read your email" to provide contextual ads in Gmail and Microsoft's Hotmail doesn't. Oh Steve, you're just bitter because Google got away with something you never could. And its ad-targeting software is smarter than yours. [CRN]