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Microsoft's Hotmail is hotter than ever. The free e-mail service surpassed the 100 million user mark, the software giant says Monday.

The company also says that its instant messenger service, MSN Messenger, maintained its top spot against competitors such as Yahoo and AOL Time Warner.

MSN Messenger Service recorded 31.9 million unique users worldwide in March, maintaining its lead as the most-used free instant-messaging service, Microsoft says, citing research from Jupiter Media Metrix. It is the second month in a row that Microsoft has beat out AOL's Instant Messenger and ICQ services and the Yahoo Messenger service for the top spot.

Jupiter's study was based on unique users in the U.S., U.K, Germany, France, Japan, Australia, Canada, Spain, Brazil, Italy, Argentina, and Switzerland, Microsoft says.

The latest figures show a shift in popularity for the onetime underdog. In November 2000, MSN Messenger lagged behind AOL Instant Messenger in terms of U.S. users 21.5 million to 10.3 million, according to Media Metrix. From February to March, the service added 2 million users worldwide.

Hotmail also topped the charts in March, according to numbers compiled internally by Microsoft, which counted 100 million active e-mail accounts. Since Microsoft acquired Hotmail in 1997, the company says it has increased its user base tenfold.

Both of the software giant's Web communication services are available around the world--Hotmail in ten languages, Messenger in 26 languages. The Spanish-language version of Hotmail has attracted 8 million unique users in March, according to the research firm.

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