Hotmail is Finally Hot Again
I opened a Hotmail account today.
And I said it out loud.
Not too long ago, someone published a list of the hierarchy of email @ddresses, from the best (your own domain) to the worst (probably Hotmail). Though I have to admit that when Hotmail first came out, it being one of the early online services, everybody had a Hotmail account, me included. It very quickly went the way of all only-cool-for-an-instant items, and was the sort of address only your mom or your weird Uncle George the Luddite would admit to having.
The big news of the year, though, was the Microsoft was going to revamp Hotmail, and turn it into an online version of Outlook - and about time, I'd say. The consensus is that Microsoft did a really good job.
What occurs to me both in looking at my own setup, and in reading reviews, is that Microsoft took the best of its hard working email client, Outlook, and the best of online email program extraordinaire (Gmail) and pulled the best features from each, combining them into a solid, savvy, service that offers flair as well as function - and can serve as your one-stop portal for email, social connection, contacts, and best of all, organization.
If you made me choose Gmail's one failure for my money, and failure is too strong a word, really, it would be that Gmail makes it difficult to organize your stuff in a way that's compatible with working versus searching. Gmail opted to organize email into topics, or tag, before it finally succumbed to the idea of folders, and even when it finally realized that when in work mode, most people do want to organized by folders rather than search by topic - even if tagging a thread makes it accessible by many different topics. It's that very feature, for better or worse, that is daunting: what did I tag that again? When I'm thinking in terms of folders, I am very precise: I organize by client, by job, by year - I build a system and think that way. When I'm tagging, it is more mood dependent, or perhaps I organize by the nature of the specific email.
Outlook - or Hotmail - has that new, bright, boxy look of Microsoft's Windows 8. But it's pulled with it a lot of what we know and love about Outlook email - the easy to parse left to right organization, the folders, the reading pane, and the customizable views.
Quick views allows you to access the power of Gmails tagged searches, letting you choose only emails with attachments, or smart categories (I want to see Amazon shipping information only), and it brings up front a capacity Outlook always had, which is to search your inbox by keyword.
Like Gmail, Hotmail now offers contact photos, instant access to Facebook or Skype (the Google Chat alternative) video calling, Contacts, a calendar, and something called "SkyDrive," the equivalent of Google's Drive - a home in the clouds for your photos, documents, and shared items.
For now, I'll use this email platform for business, to finally find a way to segregate my friends and info emails from my home business emails. Having found that it takes me far too long to sort through emails each morning, it will be useful to know that I'm getting down to business, as opposed to wasting an hour or so separating wheat from chaff - and getting sidetracked on fun but non-profitable activity. Unless of course, I want to.
It all looks pretty promising. Give me a month or so and I'll give you a final verdict.
And I said it out loud.
Not too long ago, someone published a list of the hierarchy of email @ddresses, from the best (your own domain) to the worst (probably Hotmail). Though I have to admit that when Hotmail first came out, it being one of the early online services, everybody had a Hotmail account, me included. It very quickly went the way of all only-cool-for-an-instant items, and was the sort of address only your mom or your weird Uncle George the Luddite would admit to having.
The big news of the year, though, was the Microsoft was going to revamp Hotmail, and turn it into an online version of Outlook - and about time, I'd say. The consensus is that Microsoft did a really good job.
What occurs to me both in looking at my own setup, and in reading reviews, is that Microsoft took the best of its hard working email client, Outlook, and the best of online email program extraordinaire (Gmail) and pulled the best features from each, combining them into a solid, savvy, service that offers flair as well as function - and can serve as your one-stop portal for email, social connection, contacts, and best of all, organization.
If you made me choose Gmail's one failure for my money, and failure is too strong a word, really, it would be that Gmail makes it difficult to organize your stuff in a way that's compatible with working versus searching. Gmail opted to organize email into topics, or tag, before it finally succumbed to the idea of folders, and even when it finally realized that when in work mode, most people do want to organized by folders rather than search by topic - even if tagging a thread makes it accessible by many different topics. It's that very feature, for better or worse, that is daunting: what did I tag that again? When I'm thinking in terms of folders, I am very precise: I organize by client, by job, by year - I build a system and think that way. When I'm tagging, it is more mood dependent, or perhaps I organize by the nature of the specific email.
Outlook - or Hotmail - has that new, bright, boxy look of Microsoft's Windows 8. But it's pulled with it a lot of what we know and love about Outlook email - the easy to parse left to right organization, the folders, the reading pane, and the customizable views.
Quick views allows you to access the power of Gmails tagged searches, letting you choose only emails with attachments, or smart categories (I want to see Amazon shipping information only), and it brings up front a capacity Outlook always had, which is to search your inbox by keyword.
Like Gmail, Hotmail now offers contact photos, instant access to Facebook or Skype (the Google Chat alternative) video calling, Contacts, a calendar, and something called "SkyDrive," the equivalent of Google's Drive - a home in the clouds for your photos, documents, and shared items.
For now, I'll use this email platform for business, to finally find a way to segregate my friends and info emails from my home business emails. Having found that it takes me far too long to sort through emails each morning, it will be useful to know that I'm getting down to business, as opposed to wasting an hour or so separating wheat from chaff - and getting sidetracked on fun but non-profitable activity. Unless of course, I want to.
It all looks pretty promising. Give me a month or so and I'll give you a final verdict.
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