news Microsoft and PBL Media joint venture ninemsn this week started allowing users to register email addresses in the Australian Hotmail.com.au domain, as opposed to the traditional Hotmail.com domain.

A ninemsn spokesperson confirmed the move yesterday afternoon, saying it increased the availability of email address options to users and gave them a local option to the free online email mainstay. There are more than 4.3 million people using the Windows Live Hotmail service in Australia, according to a Nielsen Netview report from December 2009.

Users had already been able to register to use the live.com.au domain name for several years, but it’s the first time the Hotmail.com.au name has been available. Hotmail.co.nz has also been made available for New Zealand use.

Users are encouraged to login to the Windows Live https://signup.live.com.au to pick the email address of their choice.

Hotmail was one of the first free email services to launch online (back in 1996) and was acquired by Microsoft in 1996 and re-branded several times. It remains one of the most popular online offerings with several hundred million users globally.

Security issue?
Local systems administrator Alan Lee, who works for content management firm Elcom Technology, expressed concern over the move, as he said he saw a substantial amount of traffic through his email servers that was already wrongfully addressed to Hotmail.com.au addresses — email users had mistakenly been appending the .au suffix to emails for some time.

He added there was a concern that people could impersonate others who had existing Hotmail.com addresses — for example, an individual could set up a john.smith@hotmail.com.au address and mimic an individual who already had a john.smith@hotmail.com account. He questioned whether ninemsn should have mapped the new domain to the old one, so users with existing Hotmail.com addresses would receive email to the same account name at Hotmail.com.au.

But Alex Parsons, director of marketing and MSN products at ninemsn, said the company had yet to receive feedback of duplicate email addresses being an issue for customers.

“However, as with all mails you send, we recommend checking over the recipient’s email address to ensure you are sending the email to the correct person and webmail address,” he said.

“If a customer had more than one email address, through pop3 functionality which Hotmail provides, they could link their existing Hotmail account to a new one they created and use the new one as the primary account.”

Image credit: Stephanie Hofschlaeger, royalty free

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1. chris
   Posted 29/01/2010 at 3:38 pm | Permalink | Reply

   As a Customer Messaging Manager for a bank with millions of AU records it is crazy the amount of people who put @hotmail.com.au in as their email address even though it is not available. For ninemsn to do this it is going to open up a whole world of issues of identity theft and fraud.
   Yahoo have a good system where you choose during sign up if you want @yahoo.com or .com.au or a number of other options.

   Interesting to see if this gets traction in a few months once a few instances have been experienced.

2. Renai LeMay
   Posted 29/01/2010 at 4:11 pm | Permalink | Reply

   I agree Chris … from the sheer amount of emails I have seen with Hotmail.com.au appended accidentally, I reckon there will be more than a few rogue emails bouncing around to the wrong people because of this move.

   However, as ninemsn has said — that isn’t their fault — and people should be more careful to make sure they’re emailing the right address. Arguments on both sides. What this illustrates for me is the problem that comes in every time you get human fallibility involved in any kind of technological transaction ;)