Outlook.com review: first-look

Wednesday, August 1st, 2012

It was only a few months ago that Microsoft asked us to give Hotmail another chance — with fairly disastrous consequences. Now it’s giving up on Hotmail itself, and migrating users to the new Outlook.com.

Is Outlook.com the webmail service that will finally tear us away from Gmail? Here are our first impressions.

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Moving from Gmail to Hotmail: the disastrous conclusion

Wednesday, April 25th, 2012

PC Pro editor Barry Collins is conducting a two-week experiment, returning to Hotmail after six years of using Gmail, to examine Microsoft’s claims that its webmail system has improved. You can read his previous blog posts on Moving from Gmail to Hotmail here.

Today, I was all set to bring you the verdict on my two-week experiment of swapping Gmail for Hotmail. Last night, however, I spent in the pub with the PC Pro team, giving the latest issue of the magazine a good send off. Which is when the problems started.

The Twitter client on my iPhone started buzzing like a wasp trapped in a lamp shade. I received the following message:

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Hotmail vs Gmail: composing messages

Wednesday, April 18th, 2012

PC Pro editor Barry Collins is conducting a two-week experiment, returning to Hotmail after six years of using Gmail, to examine Microsoft’s claims that its webmail system has improved. You can read his previous blog posts on Moving from Gmail to Hotmail here.

Until now, I’ve largely focused on features that help sort out the chaos of your inbox. But what are the respective webmail systems like when it comes to the seemingly straightforward task of writing new messages?

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Moving from Gmail to Hotmail: sorting and importing

Friday, April 13th, 2012

PC Pro editor Barry Collins is conducting a two-week experiment, returning to Hotmail after six years of using Gmail, to examine Microsoft’s claims that its webmail system has improved. You can read his previous blog posts on Moving from Gmail to Hotmail here.

So I’m a few days into my Hotmail revival, and I’m definitely warming to Microsoft’s much-maligned webmail service.

My favourite thing so far? The way it allows you to easily sort messages into different categories without having to laboriously label each email first. Click the Social Updates link at the top of the inbox, for example, and only alerts sent from my Facebook and Twitter accounts appear. Click Newsletters, and only the circulars sent out by various websites are displayed. I’ll repeat: the entire inbox is intelligently and accurately filtered automatically. You don’t have to do anything other than click the tab at the top. (more…)

Moving from Gmail to Hotmail

Wednesday, April 11th, 2012

Yes, you did read that headline correctly. No, it’s not meant to be the other way around. For the first time in six years, I’m using Hotmail as my primary webmail account. Well, for a fortnight, at least.

Why am I embarking on this experiment?  Well, because Microsoft challenged me to. “When you ask people about Hotmail, most of them seem to think about how it was in 2006,” Microsoft’s product manager, Ian Moulster told me. “Spam was a significant issue [with Hotmail] back in 2006. Today Hotmail has less than 3% spam.”

It’s not the only thing that’s changed about Hotmail. There are plenty of powerful new features in there: the ability to “sweep” messages from specific senders into dedicated folders; the ability to sort messages into predefined categories such as “newsletters” and “social updates”; some really smart looking integration with Microsoft’s Sky Drive.

Hotmail also lets you collect and send messages from other email accounts, including Gmail. “Give it a go for a fortnight, and if you don’t like it, switch it off again,” said Moulster. So that’s what I’m doing. Switching off Gmail for a fortnight and migrating to Hotmail to find out if Microsoft’s webmail service really is better than its reputation suggests.

I’ll provide regular updates on this blog about how I’m getting on.

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Is Hotmail’s spam filtering really the “best in the business”?

Tuesday, February 14th, 2012

If you read the Windows Live blog yesterday, you’d be forgiven for thinking Microsoft’s Hotmail team had been surprised by a wonderful piece of research into webmail spam performance.

“Hotmail has come a long way in spam protection and is now among the best in the industry in keeping spam out of your inbox,” the company’s group program manager, Dick Craddock, writes. “Our own internal metrics, customer feedback, and even a recent third-party report confirms that no mail service offers better protection than Hotmail.”

That’s quite a big claim, given Hotmail has something of a reputation as a spam magnet. But Craddock goes on to highlight the results of this seemingly independent report:

“As much as we invest in our own telemetry and instrumentation to understand the spam problem, sometimes it’s nice to get an outside perspective. Cascade Insights gave us just that recently with a comprehensive study of the major email services to see how each performed in the face of incoming spam.”

Here’s what Microsoft’s Craddock and the 14-page report – which is linked to from the blog – don’t tell you. The research was commissioned and paid for by Microsoft. Microsoft chose the webmail services to be tested, Microsoft had right of veto over publication of the results. If Microsoft had come second or third to Gmail and Yahoo in the spam test, you can bet your mortgage we wouldn’t have heard about it.

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Hotmail security upgrade: too little, too late

Monday, September 27th, 2010

Hotmail’s slipshod security was the main reason I jumped ship from Microsoft’s webmail service way back in 2005. Dealing with an inbox stuffed full of unfiltered spam, phishing attacks and other malicious messages was about as much fun as picking hair out of the plughole. In Wormwood Scrubs.

I kept my account open because various website registrations were still linked to that account, but I’ve seen nothing to tempt me back into regular use. Quite the opposite in fact. In the past few months alone, both a colleague at work and my girlfriend have had their Hotmail accounts hijacked and used to send malicious links to everyone in their address book.  Microsoft insists this problem is industry-wide, but I’ve never seen a Gmail account hacked in such a manner.

Microsoft knows this is a serious problem: today it’s announced a series of “upgrades” to Hotmail’s security… that don’t go anywhere near far enough, in my opinion.

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Switching from Hotmail to Gmail

Monday, June 1st, 2009

Last week I decided to take the plunge and switch from Hotmail to Gmail. I’ve been flirting with the idea for a while, tempted by the never-ending upgrades and conversation-view email layout. The thing that had always held me back was that I’ve been a Hotmail user for over ten years. There were a lot of emails in that account that I didn’t want to lose, so I procrastinated. Which was daft, because switching is incredibly easy and you don’t have to lose a thing. It goes a bit like this.

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How to break the Google monopoly

Friday, July 18th, 2008

You may not have noticed this, but Google is quite a dominant company. Chances are that almost everyone you know has a Google email account, a sign-in for Google Docs, and uses its search engine every day. So you do have to wonder how anyone is going to break its stranglehold – something I asked one of its email competitors today.

The chances are that you will have heard of GMX, but the chances are that you also won’t have used its services. (more…)