Redmond, Washington — Windows Live Hotmail has a new mojo up its sleeve–one that is aimed directly at getting users with e-mail accounts on other services to use it exclusively, even if they keep that address. Software monopolist Microsoft has announced a cool new feature that enables users to send and receive e-mail from a non-Hotmail accounts.
The new feature, called EASI ID, announced by Microsoft earlier today, is pretty straightforward, and will be available worldwide in the next few days. Users just have to register and validate their outside e-mail addresses, which then allows them to continue to use their existing e-mail while also taking advantage of Hotmail features like Sweep, or the ability to send 10GB worth of photos at once.
“Today we begin rolling out a feature that makes it easy to use Hotmail with any existing e-mail address,” wrote Dick Craddock, Group Program Manager at Windows Live Hotmail, in a blog post.
Hotmail will now let you use an e-mail address from another provider to read and send from that address. (Credit: Microsoft)
As Hotmail’s Craddock, describes on the Inside Windows Live blog, this functionality is something that has long been operational in the Outlook software client, but not on the Web.
Hotmail users already have the option to send e-mails from another address through the “Send As” feature, but today’s update provides a more complete e-mail management experience. Craddock also mentioned that more than 30 million Hotmail registrations have taken place where users provided another service’s e-mail address to get in the door, and that these will now show up as an account you can link up to within the Web client.
As you can notice in the screenshot above, Microsoft’s example shows a Hotmail inbox that is integrated with a Gmail account.
Gmail and Yahoo Mail both have similar options available for managing multiple e-mail accounts. Microsoft is hoping to keep users familiar with the Hotmail platform on their servers by making it easy to manage their other e-mail accounts via the service. Some people have work accounts that they would rather manage via Hotmail; others might not want to send messages from the Hotmail domain but still like the interface. These are the types of users Microsoft is targeting.
Even if they do not switch, the implementation means users can try out what Hotmail has to offer without much effort with nearly 350 million users, Hotmail is still by far the most popular webmail service around, but Microsoft is feeling the pressure from its competition. The tech giant recently revamped its webmail client with a slew of new features to keep it competitive with its Google and Yahoo counterparts.