http://stuff.techwhack.com/archives/2007/09/30/coolhotmail/
More on the custom Hotmail addresses recently launched by Microsoft in India. The premise is you don’t need to be long-user-name-because-the-good-ones-are-gone@hotmail.com you can look more professional and stand out from the pack by taking a hotmail email account anchored to a different domain name.
I tried this years ago.. Growing a small free-email service called Mailgods.com .. It was a ton of work and taught me a great deal about how difficult it is to run a free email service in a profitable way. It’s hard to keep spammers and bad guys from abusing accounts while selling enough advertising to offset costs. Microsoft has plenty of experience having run Hotmail for 10 years, so I have no doubt they’ll be better able to deal with the problems than a guy working from home. The one thing we did notice was the incredible demand for that service when we offered our names. There was no shortage of folks who wanted an account. I expect Google to follow suit and if they find a way to allow others to plug in "really" desirable names on a revshare basis, I expect this to be a new source of revenue for millions of domain registrants – Ultimately making high quality generic domains even more valuable.
It is’nt just about using email to add value to domains, looking at the actual domain names on offer on CoolHotmail speaks more importantly to the quiet development of Indian domains (.IN and .CO.IN) as an attractive ccTLD.
India is today the #5 largest internet market in the world with 60M internet users, most of whom are English speakers and using ASCII text keyboards.
Having more internet users than Germany, U.K, France, Italy, and many others provides a very strong basis for the value of the ccTLD to grow IMO.
Frank, what do you think?
Google’s approach seems to be little different.
They allow Family & Groups to host their email application for free.
https://www.google.com/a/org/
If only they would offer revenue share on the adsense served on those emails, it would motivate lot of domainers to offer this service.
I especially see value in the LastName domains
example Frank@Schilling.com
There’s an importing thing worth noting here regarding the current .in vs. .co.in debate. It would appear that MSFT is favoring the .in extension over the .co.in version. Possibly a tipping of the scales in popularity (that only a company like MSFT would see due to their size).
What happens to Microsoft mail customers when a registrant forgets to renew the domain name that has 1000 email addresses attached to it (besides creating an opportunity to a drop catcher)?
Re. the .co.in and .in debate, the .co.in domain is definitely more recognizable to end users at this stage, but .in is fast catching on.
Realise that India is an ex British colony and UK practices / naunces still hold considerable weight …. co.in is simply a natural follow on of the .co.uk extension.
Google India is branded google.co.in, but the likes of AOL, EBay (and now MSFT) using the .in domain for their local sites would probably mean that both .co.in and .in will eventually find their place in the sun.
Markets like Singapore and Hong Kong provide good comparisons. Both markets started with .COM.SG and .COM.HK. The .SG and .HK prefixes were then introduced in recent years.
Today both prefixes are just as recognisable, used interchangeably, and most importantly, both are used and advertised in local media.
I own india.co.in, jobs.co.in, business.co.in and cricket.co.in. What do you think the future of these domains would be?