Microsoft is betting that a new simplified interface and a name change will improve its Web-based email fortunes. Though it's still in the lead worldwide, according to the latest number from comScore, the company's Hotmail service has steadily been losing ground to Google's Gmail.
The name Outlook.com, which was released as a preview today, was chosen as a name people associate with email, but without the baggage of Hotmail. The service builds on recent work the company has done to greatly speed up and clean up its webmail offering, with class-leading tools for organizing and keeping email inboxes free not only of outright spam, but of all that borderline lower priority email.
The new service will tie in snugly with the leading social networks—Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn—allowing users to communicate with all of these through the single Outlook.com site. That includes Facebook Chat, and, soon, the industry-leading Skype video-calling service, which Microsoft recently acquired.
The service will also integrate with other Microsoft services—unified Contacts, Calendar, and the SkyDrive cloud storage service. A unique capability of Outlook.com is that it can view Office documents from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint directly inside the Inbox, using the cloud versions of those applications, called Office Web Apps.
PCMag.com met with Chris Jones, corporate vice president of the Windows Business Group, last week for a walkthrough with the new mail service.
"Eighteen months ago, when we started our work for Windows 8," said Jones, "we realized that with work on Windows Phone [and] Office 2013, we'd have to rethink our approach to the cloud services to deliver a new, modern email service."
Jones outlined four driving goals in designing Outlook.com: to take a different, modern approach to the user interface suited to mobile devices; to make it personal through connections to social networks; to make it smart and powerful in handling different types of email; and to put the user in control.
"Email remains a very personal experience. What happens in your mailbox are very intimate conversations," he said. "We know that it's important for people to feel like they're in control of what information is used, their privacy, and how their email is connected with other services."
Outlook.com also inherits recent releases of Hotmail's mailbox viewing and cleaning tools, which let you organize newsletters, automatically moving them to folders. It also lets you view mail by categories such as contains documents, photos, social updates, or shipping notices, or you can add your own custom categories.
Those interested in getting email addresses with the @outlook.com domain can head to Outlook.com to create a new mail account. Existing @hotmail, @live, and @msn account holders will be able to upgrade to the new webmail client while retaining their existing email addresses. Once you've got an Outlook.com account, you can import your Gmail account or Exchange account and read all the email in the same inbox, using the same viewing and cleanup tools.
You can read more about the new service on the Outlook blog, and Microsoft is hosting a Q&A about the new service today at 11 a.m. Pacific on Reddit.com.
For a detailed look at what you can do with Microsoft's new webmail, see PCMag's review of Outlook.com and the slideshow above.
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