Like Gmail, too the inbox updates automatically without the need to hit "Refresh." Hotmail adds a helpful Quick Views feature, which lets you view only emails containing photos, Office docs, shipping dates, or messages you've flagged. It beats having to search through your inbox. To use the new Active View photo, video, and Office doc viewing features, I had to install Silverlight, Microsoft's lightweight Flash-like plugin. When I clicked the Office docs icon, the doc was saved to my SkyDrive. From here, I viewed and edited the document in the new Office Web apps—pretty slick. I also could watch YouTube, Hulu, Justin.tv, and DailyMotion clips right in my inbox with Active View. Photo slideshows also looked good, created on the fly from attached photo's I'd recieved. Yahoo offers video viewing, but only of YouTube, while Gmail offers no similar conveniences.

You can add your own Hotmail folders more easily than in Gmail, but not more easily than in Yahoo Mail. Like Apple's MobileMe mail, Hotmail lets you add nested subfolders. It also offers drag-and-drop e-mails from the inbox right onto any of your folders—try that in Gmail! New view choices grace the top of Hotmail's inbox: All, Unread, From contacts, Social Updates, From Groups, and Everything Else. You can collapse the last three if they're not useful to you, but these options give you one way to focus on particular categories of e-mail. They beat the previous version's simple sorting options. Cleaning Out Your Mailbox
The Windows Live team has made a priority this time around of letting you view only the messages you care about. It's not just about eliminating spam, but also "graymail"—those e-mails that you may have signed up to receive or are from an organization with whom you do business. The tool Microsoft offers in Hotmail 2011 to deal with this is called "Sweep."

The new Sweep menu option offers four choices "Move all from…," "Delete all from…," "Mark this folder as read," and "Empty this folder." This makes it easy to deal with all e-mail from a particular organization at once by moving or deleting them automatically. However, you can't create a new folder from this menu. Sweep is a big help, and though advanced users could build filter rules to do in Yahoo Mail or Gmail, they can't sweep all the existing mails to the trash or another folder in one shot.

Hotmail has a "Junk" button like Yahoo Mail's Spam, and you can also chose "Mark as" and then "Phishing scam" (you can also add any address to a blocked senders list). I tried signing my e-mail up for a lot of dubious notices, for things like sale items and online drugstores, and Microsoft's SmartScreen spam blocker did an excellent job keeping my inbox clean. It caught more spam than Yahoo, and takes you right to your messages without adding an extra click to get past news and updates (Yahoo requires users to open a pro account to avoid the distracting sidebar ads and to get decent spam filtering).

Themes and Multiple Email Accounts
As you can in Gmail, you can dress up your Hotmail inbox using themes—there are 24 choices that change the header image. Six dynamic themes, such as Tugboat, Prairie, Desert, and Sports, change periodically based on the time of day and the weather.

As with the previous version of Hotmail, you can connect another mail account—Gmail, AOL, Yahoo Pro, but not Microsoft Exchange. The setup is super simple—just enter your second e-mail address and password, and Hotmail will figure out servers and settings. You can utilize more advanced options if you know the server address, such as whether you want to keep messages on the server or whether the account requires a secure connection. You can also choose whether the new accounts messages will appear in the general Inbox or in their own.

You may want to go in the opposite direction, and read your Hotmail in a different mail reader. As with AIM Mail, you can do this with a free account using the POP3 protocol. Gmail goes a step further, offering the preferable IMAP protocol. Yahoo makes you pay for any access to your account, with its $20-a-year Plus account. There's also a Hotmail Plus option for the same price, which removes ads and increases storage beyond the included 10GB.

Another new, multiple e-mail address solution offered by Microsoft is the alias address feature. The average Internet user has at least three e-mail accounts, and often wishes she had more. Hotmail is the first e-mail provider to come up with a satisfactory free solution to people's need for different addresses for different parts of their lives, and some are hesitant to use their main e-mail address for potential marketing e-mail deluges. Yahoo Mail offers disposable addresses in its premium Plus service. Gmail only offers a workaround for this kind of functionality, by which you can add periods anywhere within your existing e-mail address or follow the account name with + and several more characters. Then you have to filter incoming mail from those addresses to folders. But that method doesn't protect your identity or inbox effectively. The new Hotmail feature creates a completely different From address, but the mail still arrives in your main account.

Speed , Compatibility, and Calendar
Hotmail is snappy and desktop-like, but Gmail is a tad faster. I could read e-mail in any of the current browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and IE), and since moving out of beta Hotmail's calendar now works perfectly in Chrome.

Hotmail offers multiple calendars with to-do lists, and supports iCal, so you can subscribe to a public Web calendar or import an ICS file. I had no problem importing the New York Mets' 2010 game schedule. One caveat is that you can't use Calendar to subscribe to iCals whose Web addresses begin https:// or webcals://.

Instant Messages
Web-based chatting has been available in Hotmail before this version, but now it doesn't have to open a new tab—Chat can take place in a box at the bottom of the inbox. It now works in browsers other than Internet Explorer, and the chat window remains even if you navigate to another Windows Live page. It's a more compact design that works well, but I prefer the richer options available in the installed Windows Live Messenger client. Socializing Your Mail
Social content is everything these days, and Microsoft understands that the inbox is an obvious place to centralize it by letting you connect your existing Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and other social sites to your Windows Live Hotmail account. In all, I counted 69 available services including Flickr, Pandora, and YouTube. Yahoo Mail also has a social connection with its Pulse service, but I prefer Hotmail's approach. Gmail doesn't offer anything comparable.

Photos, Video, and Docs, Maps—Quick Add
Inserting photos, videos, and Office documents is simplified by buttons above the message area. You can upload up to 10GB of pictures to SkyDrive, where they'll be accessible to your mail's recipient without clogging his or her inbox. As with Gmail, there's a 25MB limit for file attachments, but when I tried a file bigger than this, the SkyDrive option was offered—it's a boon for large-media-file sharers.

Another clever new feature is the ability to insert items from Bing, such as images, videos, and even Maps. I could easily send a message that contained video, docs, and a map, collected from anywhere on the Web.

Mobile
The new mobile Hotmail client greatly improves in 2011. On my iPhone, I could get to far more than the simple list of emails shown by the current mobile Hotmail site; I could choose folders, and even view my Office documents and photos stored on SkyDrive. Calendars, Contacts, and Groups are also accessible, and my desktop theme choice even adorned the top of the mobile browser. Even the Quick View options can be used.

Final Thoughts
It's fast, clean, easy on the eyes, and easy to use. Hotmail 2011's unique new tools for handling inbox clutter, solutions for photo and document attachments, alias addresses, and integration with leading social networks are just a few of many strong arguments for why Hotmail's my new Editors' Choice—and why it should be your Web-based e-mail service.

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