The new Hotmail gives Gmail a run for its money

So basically the new Hotmail is mostly the same as the old Hotmail, but:

1) It offers you some of the features GMail already has, like the conversation view.

2) It does not offer you some of the features GMail does, such as labels. By the way, you can tell that the author doesn't really understand labels, because he claims that the archiving is the same as deleting.

3) It offers you some dubious features that GMail does not have. Preview, for example, is something I find utterly useless. If I can't glean what the e-mail is about from either the subject or the short text preview GMail offers, then it can generally wait for me to open it. However, I'm aware that this is just my personal preference. What really flabbergasted me was the "Sweep" feature. I don't know whether the author described it well, but if he did, then I don't understand why he thinks it's so great. Maybe I'm a pessimist, but I think it's naive to trust in software's ability to guess what your criteria is for deleting future messages "like" the ones you marked.

4) It offers some preconfigured filters and views that GMail doesn't. Some of these things sound really useful, especially filtering by senders from your contact list.

Here's one of the things the new Hotmail doesn't seem to have, that I consider GMail's killer feature (apart from the whole awesome labels+filters paradigm): Labs. I absolutely love multiple inboxes and superstars. Also, the new Google Apps integration with GMail is a huge plus. Finally, let's not forget that GMail's spam filter, in my experience, works better than Hotmail's spam filter ever did. I don't think Hotmail will be giving GMail "a run for its money" anytime soon.

Author omits a major feature of Gmail, the spam filter. At the time of release this was a killer, if memory serves. Personally, this was a primary motivation for switching.

A working spam filter was a major reason to recommend Gmail to less proficient users as well. Less malware, phishing and spam means less hassle for everyone. My hotmail inbox is SMTP'd to Gmail and filtered there, so I know quite well how much spam hotmail misses(more than 50% of caught spam for me).

EDIT: Just checked, Gmail recommends disabling additional spam filters to speed up transfers.

There is a huge stigma associated with a .hotmail.com address. No way around that.

I read the article and signed up. Here's why Hotmail still sucks:

Tried importing my 1500+ contacts from gmail and hotmail said it can only accept up to 1500.

Also, even though you can 'add people' to your hotmail/msn network using Google's oauth and contact APIs I'm ironically forced to import contacts using an Outlook CSV file. Why the inconsistency there?

WARNING: During the 'add people' wizard I almost accidentally sent out 1000+ MSN live invites to my google contact list. Maybe MSFT confused the words 'viral' and 'virus'..?

Finally, my brand new hotmail account feels utterly sluggish next to my 6 year old gmail account.

The author of the article mentions the ads in Hotmail's interface as a big drawback. I think the fact that every e-mail that you send has an ad tagged on at the bottom is a much bigger problem. I don't care what e-mail provider you use, but if every communication that you send comes with an ad attached, you look like a doofus.

Hotmail will always be the mark of 'unprofessional' and 'throwaway' email addresses, they were that since day one and it hasn't changed much. In the online payment world having a hotmail address is a strike against you during the processing of your payment.

Gmail users are not going to try hotmail any more than hotmail users are going to try gmail, unless they were already planning on doing so, migrating your mail is costly.

What it might do is to stop some users defecting they would have otherwise lost because of being dissatisfied, but I really don't see how this will woe any customers at a competitor.

No screenshots or video? Sorry, I'm not going to take your word for it that it's cool and deserves another try. And add me to the chorus praising Gmail's spam filter.

quote: "the world's largest free e-mail system with more than 360 million users around the world. (Yahoo has more than 300 million and Gmail a little less than 200 million, according to comScore"

It would be interesting to get some stats on the actual usage from the 360 million users. I would imagine every other account being created for a single spam message and disposed never to be used again.

One thing the author didn't experience enough is the lack of spam filter (which imho is the Gmail's feather in the hat). I opened a live.com account around a month back. I got a decent account very close to resembling my name and one I thought could be forwarded to my gmail account. I logged in and I see the animated flash banner distracting me from even seeing my first email. It's like I logged in to see this banner ad. I logged out after finding that hotmail doesn't allow you to forward your email to any other windows live associated account(hotmail?) or a domain's email(which I didn't try). A week later, I logged in to try the forwarding to domain options. I wish I had taken a screenshot, but I had one and half pages of spam. Now this emailid; mind you - I didn't email anyone; I didn't receive any email from any friends. Nothing!. All I did was send a test email to my gmail account. So I logged out for good. I won't be visiting live/hotmail anytime soon.

Still no IMAP for Hotmail, that's a deal breaker for many who cares.

As the author points out, years of gmail archives create a very high switching cost for moving to another email provider. Not to mention the fact that setting up an infinite email forward is an imperfect solution to the problem. It would be nice (pie in the sky, here) if there were a way to easily transfer your email account, address and all, between two different providers, sort of like how you can do so with your phone number.

I had to check because I thought Microsoft still owned Slate, but apparently they sold it to Washington Post in 2004. Still, it is a bit difficult for me to swallow an opinion piece from a previously Microsoft owned non-technical magazine.

What about ads tagged along with every email? gives me one more reason to not switch over any time soon away from gmail...