Redmond, Washington — Software monopolist Microsoft is aiming to make its Hotmail e-mail service better than ever, on Monday, announced sweeping changes unveiled new tools for its worldwide market leading e-mail service, Windows Live Hotmail, at simultaneous events on the east and west coasts, in a bid to combat Gmail, and hold onto its crown in the webmail market.
Hotmail, despite losing every ounce of its luster in recent years, remains the most popular webmail client–and rather bravely tackling what it admits is a subpar perception of the brand–with a series of new features designed to help users easily clean up their inboxes.
The Redmond Vole believes that only about two per cent of inbox email is actually genuine spam, with the bulk unwanted newsletter deals and alerts that were signed up for and are now either forgotten or no longer of interest –that Microsoft calls “grey mail”.
At a gathering organized here Monday afternoon, Windows Live corporate vice president Chris Jones elaborated that Microsoft has long been conscious that the Hotmail brand was being destroyed by a series of problems that affected users’ experiences, including storage, spam, functioning, and an inability to work perfectly on most mobile devices.
Over the next few months Microsoft will roll out new features to combat this problem. The new tools are conceived to make it easier for users to unsubscribe from unwanted mailing lists and keep their inboxes tidy.
“What really characterizes graymail is that the same message that one person thinks is ‘spam’ could be really meaningful to another person. It is not black and white, hence the name,” Hotmail group program manager Dick Craddock writes in the Windows Live blog.
“Despite an impressive decrease of true spam in the inbox,” he says, “we found that most customers are still getting newsletters, product offers, and other clutter. In fact, 75 per cent of email identified as spam by our customers actually turns out to be unwanted graymail that they receive as a result of having signed up on a legitimate website.”
But those issues escalated in 2006, Jones argued, and since then, Microsoft has been proactively addressing them, attempting to ensure that it gives users a broad set of new tools to help them improve performance, minimize spam, boost storage, and streamline organization.
Besides, it has being gobbled alive by Google’s competing product, which has become established as the world’s preeminent browser-based email solution. In an interview with WinRumors, Microsoft admitted to becoming lost with Hotmail:
We really kind of lost our way a little bit. Meanwhile, Gmail made their debut, and they were flipping out some great stuff especially around storage and they were really being very disturbing and got an awful lot of traction off the back of that. We lost our focus on the end user. We have recognized that and realized that we have to make a lot of changes.
Although today’s update is cosmetic, and functional. But first, the company will apply its anti-spam engine to newsletters and set up a separate folder in users’ inboxes especially for such content. A single-click unsubscribe capability is also being included so that users can clean their own email, and the results will be fed back to other accounts to improve the service.
In addition, the essential new feature released is ‘Categories’, which is the equivalent of Gmail’s ‘Label’ feature. That Hotmail lacked this for so long indicates exactly how far Microsoft has fallen behind Google in this space. Still, the direct feature rip is welcome, as Labels are an important aspect of Gmail, and were much needed in Hotmail.
Also, packed in this update is the ability to ‘pin’ emails to the top of one’s inbox. This is a rather a knocked-down way of copying Gmail’s Priority Inbox, as it allows for emails deemed important to not be lost
Hotmail users will now have the ability to automatically schedule cleanup of their inboxes. This is just one of a set of new features that will be available for the Web mail service within a couple of weeks. (Credit: Microsoft)
Finally, a new feature allows for scheduled purging. To clean existing mail, a Scheduled Cleanup function will delete emails older than three, 10, 30, or 60 days. With this, Hotmail will also happily scan your inbox and delete all messages of a certain sort older than a particular date and can scan through multiple emails from the same sender and just keep the most recent one. Important emails, such as bank statements can be automatically archived as well. This should allow users to conserve storage space and keep their inbox tidy.
Interestingly, the company has also introduced an Android App for Hotmail, completing the ecosystem of mobile access to the Webmail service. The app is now available from the Android Market, and supports push email, synced calendar and folders, sending photos from phone cameras, multiple account support, and sending, receiving, and viewing of attachments. You can find it in here.