But oh, how the online landscape has changed. Every ISP gives you email, from telcos to supermarkets. Create a website and email comes as part of the package. While other forms of digital communication - txt, chat, social network messaging - are as free and easy as email.
When my creative cronies are all on mac.com (didn't Apple just overtake Microsoft as the world's biggest tech company?) and my twenty-something buddies go gaga for gmail, how has Microsoft responded?
Advertising. A big fat trad advertising campaign.
Now some of my oldest and bestest friends are planners. So hopefully they'll forgive me for saying that the campaign line sounds like it was written in the planning department. "The new busy."
It reeks of research; and not in a good way. You can imagine the pointy-headed person proudly pre-ambling ... "People are telling us how madly frantic their lives are. What a nightmare it is just to keep on top of emails. But hotmail can help them manage everything! So they'll be busy in a nice, relaxed way. We call it the ‘new busy'." Pause for applause.
What does Microsoft give us? Some platitudinous lines and pretty pictures. One press execution features a couple in a boat and the headline "Email on the go".
Well, yes. So what? There's nothing new here. And tucked away in the corner is the newbusy web address.
Will Microsoft give the reader a compelling reason to visit the site? No. But as your reviewer, I did it on your behalf; so you don't have to bother and be disappointed.
I expected some news, some meat, some evidence that hotmail is hot again. But unless I'm missing something, the site is free of anything that resembles a competitive claim, unique benefit or killer fact.
In the absence of a great product story, there's desperate stuff about how to "exercise anywhere" and other guff.
Naturally I can click through to my old hotmail account (which is gathering dust). And it's still the same tired-looking, typographical balls-up it's been for years - with the familiar technological glitches and gripes.
All the advertising achieves is to remind you that Microsoft may have the ad budgets, but hotmail has defo lost its mojo. Anyone for "tepidmail"?
Simon S Kershaw is a creative consultant and a former creative director at Craik Jones.