Hotmail (update) = Gmail + Outlook

[guru]

Microsoft kicked off a roll out of its Milestone 2 release of Hotmail Wave 5 on Monday.

The updated features will improve a number of existing features and introduce some powerful new mail management tools for power users. In an exclusive interview with WinRumors, Microsoft’s Mark West admitted that the company has felt the pressure from Gmail recently and wanted to respond. “We really kind of lost our way a little bit,” admitted West. “Gmail came out, they were doing some great stuff especially around storage and they were really being very disruptive and got an awful lot of traction off the back of that.” As a result a number of power users and average Hotmail users turned to Gmail to better organise their incoming mail. “We lost our focus on the end user,” said West. “We’ve recognised that and realised that we have to make a lot of changes.”

The changes will change the way that power users see Hotmail as the company moves a number of Outlook features over to Hotmail and introduces a categories feature which is identical to Gmail’s labelling option.

http://www.winrumors.com/hotmail-updated-to-include-gmail-like-tagging-and-more-outlook-features/

[Somnus]

Great, now they just have to enable POP support for those of use that don't want to use the Outlook Connector.

That is really the only reason I use Gmail over Hotmail.

[LittleNeutrino Veteran]

I use windows live mail for one of my domains (not by choice) and i have the email ported over to gmail using pop3

[riceBox]

Great, now they just have to enable POP support for those of use that don't want to use the Outlook Connector.

That is really the only reason I use Gmail over Hotmail.

Isnt' that Hotmail already provides POP3 support without the need for Outlook connector?

[paulbeattie87]

Isnt' that Hotmail already provides POP3 support without the need for Outlook connector?

I think somnus meant IMAP. That's is one big missing feature for me. That and some investment into using hotmail with your domain e.g. Aliases, domain aliases, groups etc.

[Eric Veteran]

Hotmail has supported POP3 since Wave 3.

The setup info is here: http://windowslivehelp.com/solution.aspx?solutionid=a485233f-206d-491e-941b-118e45a7cf1b

[revanmj]

It uses exchange instead, which is far superior, and every decent mail client (pc/mobile) supports it.

Hotmail uses Exchange ActiveSync, which is a protocol for mobile devices and as such is not supported on desktop. So IMAP is still nedeed.