Microsoft is unveiling a major upgrade to Hotmail this summer, in an attempt to become the top webmail provider in the United States by outdoing the innovations that Google's Gmail brought to the online inbox.
Now nearly 15 years old, Hotmail serves more users worldwide than any other online e-mail service, with 360 million users.
Despite reports to the contrary, e-mail isn't going away anytime soon, Microsoft said, noting that even avid users of social media services check their e-mail more often than other users, and Hotmail users share 1.5 billion photos a month.
But a year ago, the Hotmail team looked around and realized that Hotmail was lacking features (particularly in comparison to Gmail, which remains in third place among webmail providers, though its numbers continue to grow).
"Hotmail wasn't doing the best job it could to serve customers," Microsoft vice president Chris Jones told reporters Monday at a briefing in San Francisco. "We were behind on features and we felt like being number (one) in the U.S. market was important for us."
So now Microsoft wants to make e-mail simpler, automatically divvying up e-mails into convenient categories, such as e-mails from contacts, ones from e-mail lists, ones from social media services, ones with photos, others with Office documents, etc.
Starting in July or August, users will encounter a first screen that's on overview of new messages, sorted into categories, with e-mails from known contacts in the top heap, updates from services like Facebook and Twitter at the bottom, and a bar up top that lets you send a status message to whatever online service you like.
Once you are past that into the typical view of an inbox, there are one-click options on the top bar and the left bar to view messages of different types. Users can easily categorize messages and even permanently rid themselves of annoying marketing messages using what Microsoft calls "Sweeping," which moves all messages -- past and future -- from selected marketers or annoying contacts into the trash.
But perhaps the most interesting part of the upgrade comes with messages involving photos or Office documents. Hotmail will soon open e-mails with multiple photos attached by displaying them in a row on the screen, and users can click to launch a graceful slideshow right inside the browser (see the top image) using Microsoft's own Flash-like platform Silverlight, which users will have to install to get the full shebang.
The online gallery and preview also works with links to public galleries on SmugMug and Flickr, and Microsoft says it's working on doing the same for galleries that aren't public that a user has the right to see.
Users can also open a Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint document into Office Live, an online service that pairs with Skydrive to give users 25 GB of online storage. Once you open the document and make a change, the versions are saved online and you are prompted to e-mail the original recipient a link to the changed document. Neither user needs to have Office installed on their local machines to use the service.
Hotmail will let you watch video links from Hulu and YouTube right in the e-mail you are reading, and you can easily find videos to send to people using a Bing search dropdown box in the compose window.
Sending a large selection of images is easy in the new Hotmail as well, since the images aren't attached to the e-mail and instead are uploaded into a user's 25-GB SkyDrive. Recipients get an HTML e-mail with thumbnails of the image and a specially crafted link to look at a gallery online. Recipients will need a Microsoft Live ID to leave a comment on the photos, but don't need one just to see or download them as a zip file.
For those worried about security, Hotmail says it's getting good at preventing phishing attacks aimed at stealing your online passwords and will offer users the option to use HTTPS for full e-mail sessions if they want to protect their accounts from snoopers at a Wi-Fi cafe or at their work or school. (Gmail is the leader, using full HTTPS sessions as the default for all users.)
Microsoft also wants Hotmail users to have a great experience on mobile devices, so it makes it easy to use via POP and IMAP pull protocols or its push e-mail service ActiveSync. The company is not planning native apps for Android and Apple mobile products, saying users like the built-in tools and can easily use Hotmail on those services.
Still, Microsoft's new product retains hallmarks of the company's longstanding legacy of pushing users towards its proprietary formats. For instance, if a user gets a PDF, text or Open Office file in an e-mail, there's no option to open them online -- something that Gmail users can do now. The company says such support will come in future versions, but it's telling that even a format as simple to convert as .txt can't be opened into Microsoft's online version of Word from a Hotmail account.
Overall, the revamp is impressive and should keep current users from jumping ship for Google's Gmail. Like Yahoo Mail, Hotmail will retain display ads, which run in a vertical bar on the right side of the screen. Those seem far more distracting than the simple text ads Gmail uses, but unlike Google's product, the ads are not based on a computer analysis of the contents of your mail. Users can also pay $20 a year for an ad-free service.
Many of the new features will sound familiar to Gmail users (like seeing attached images rendered without downloading them and being able to open attached documents online). But to its credit, Microsoft has created some thoughtful features that outshine those that remain roughly implemented in Gmail.
Many may shy away from using Hotmail as many see the name as just one step up above having an AOL address. For those who want the new features without the Hotmail name, Hotmail will let you send and recieve mail using a different address. For those still tooling around with an AOL e-mail address, moving to Hotmail would be a definite upgrade.
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