Review: Microsoft email better, not revolutionary

NEW YORK (AP) - Longtime users of Hotmail, MSN and other Microsoft email services will start noticing a big change: When they sign in to check messages, they’ll be sent to a new service called Outlook.com.

You might be thinking, isn’t Outlook the software Microsoft Corp. makes for people to use email at work? Indeed it is, but Microsoft is now adopting that brand for personal, Web-based email services as well. It’s part of a broad makeover that includes the company’s overhaul of the Windows operating system and the Office software suite.

There’s little relationship between the two Outlooks apart from the name. That’s good. The Outlook Web App I use for checking work email at home feels like an adaptation of software meant to be installed on work computers, rather than something designed from the start to play to the Web’s strengths. The consumer Outlook.com, on the other hand, feels the way Web email should. It bears more similarities with consumer-based email services, such as Google’s Gmail and Yahoo Mail, than with the corporate Outlook.

People have been able to sign up for Outlook.com email addresses and use the new interface as a “preview” for several months now. Microsoft made Outlook.com official on Tuesday and plans to spend millions of dollars to advertise it. Microsoft is even starting to force people using older Microsoft email services to switch to Outlook.com. If you’ve already tried Outlook.com on a browser, you might find your other accounts automatically upgraded the next time you sign in. Others will be moved over starting this summer.

One important note: People will be able to keep their existing addresses while using Outlook.com. There’s no need to print new business cards replacing Hotmail with a new Outlook.com address. But if you want to change your address, you can get a new one for free. In fact, at least for now, it’s still possible to get new Hotmail and Live addresses by signing up through Hotmail.com or Live.com, rather than Outlook.com.

You’ll see a lot of improvements when you switch, though nothing feels revolutionary if you’ve already been using Gmail.

By revolutionary, I mean something along the lines of what Gmail did to email when Google introduced it in 2004.

First, Gmail scrapped the use of folders to organize older messages. Instead, it gives you labels, and you can apply as many as you want to a particular message. So an email among friends to make plans for “The Hobbit” movie might be filed away as “friends,” “movies” and even “The Hobbit.” With folders, you had to choose one folder to put your message into or create multiple copies of the messages. It’s a relic of the offline world, in which a paper document can only go in one folder without a copying machine.

Meanwhile, those 50 emails it might take to coordinate your movie date with friends could have easily cluttered your inbox. Gmail automatically groups those into “conversations,” so you see all 50 messages as a single item in your inbox.

These changes took time to get used to, but that’s what happens with revolutions.

Outlook.com adopts conversations, which makes it feel like it’s catching up to Gmail, but it still uses folders instead of labels.

The improvements over Gmail are mostly around the edges:

_ Outlook integrates with leading social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

Gmail mostly integrates with Google’s own services. With Outlook, you can have the service automatically fill your address book with contact information not just from Google but also from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and even China’s Sina service. You can chat with a Facebook friend directly from the Outlook website.

And if you get an email from a Facebook friend, you might see that person’s latest Facebook post to the right, as long as Facebook has that email address registered to the social-networking account. Keep in mind that your posts won’t start showing up next to correspondences with people you’re not friends with, unless you’ve set them on Facebook to be publicly visible.

Story Continues →

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.