MSN Hotmail today announced the lauch of Hotmail.co.uk, which will for the the first time allow hotmail addresses ending with '.co.uk'. The new email addresses will be compatible with Microsoft's MSN Messenger, and Microsoft expects demand to be huge.

Jason Keane of MSN Hotmail enthused: "People have wanted a Hotmail.co.uk address for some time and now they can get the perfect Hotmail.co.uk name that is personal to them."

MSN Hotmail has donated over 50 of the most desirable new email addresses, such as princess@hotmail.co.uk, jamesbond@hotmail.co.uk, superman@hotmail.co.uk and many others to the NSPCC. These will be auctioned off here as part of Microsoft and MSN's Decade of Difference appeal, marking 10 years of partnership with the NSPCC, which has raised £15m for the charity.

Hotmail is the world's biggest free web-based email service, with 187m active accounts worldwide, and provides 250MB of free storage space, as well as letting users send 10MB attachments. It increased the storage space available to free account holders from 2MB to 250MB in June, in response to the launch of Google's Gmail, a web-based email service offering 1GB of free space.

In May Yahoo also increased the free storage space available to its email customers, from 4MB to 100MB.®

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