I think I'll pass on putting my email through their systems. Although I have to admit this looks way better than GMail. I hope this inspires Google to do something about their interface design.
Gmail was perfect.
Comments about perfect technology keep popping up on hn. I would think that claiming any technology is "perfect" is a little self-defeating coming from a tech startup news site? The very core of what we all stand for here is advancing mankind (or making the world a better place) through whatever means we are capable (most often technology). Viewing existing technologies as "perfect" closes the mind to the possibilities of better solutions.
I wonder how many times throughout history someone has claimed some piece of technology is perfect, and the same person 10 years later chuckles at the thought of having actually used the now-antiquated and clearly-inferior technology.
SAAS means you're vulnerable to vendor change with every pageload.
Though there are getting to be tools which allow you to reverse-engineer sites and design them how you want, but this is subject to a lot of churn keeping up with the SAAS vendor.
Still lovin' my mutt.
One complaint I've heard, a lot .. almost everyone thinks new gmail UI is butt ugly.
But it's also very functional. My parents were long time yahoo-mail users, who switched a few months ago. They love never having to delete mail in order to tidy, terrific spam detection etc. My dad uses filters and archiving, but my mom has a huge inbox and only ever searches. This dichotomy between searching and labeling is an on-going debate in the family :)
Putting you in control. Email is private and confidential, and most folks we've talked to want to keep it that way. So we keep your personal email personal. We don't scan your email content or attachments and sell this information to advertisers or any other company, and we don't show ads in personal conversations. We let you decide whether to connect your account to social networks, and which ones you want to use - and you're in control of who you friend or follow. And, if you're a power user who wants to really fine tune your inbox, we let you create your own categories, folders, and rules to tailor Outlook.com to your preferences.
They're saying they don't scan your email to sell information to advertisers, that doesn't mean they don't scan it for violations of their T&C's.
Mind you, even this statement is pretty FUD-like since Gmail also doesn't "scan your email [...] and sell this information to advertisers".
When Google+ first came out quite a lot of people lost their "Google lives" (including their gmail accounts they had been using for years) when Google banned them for being under 13 or using a pseudonym.
As for the pseudonym thing, that never occurred. People lost their google+ accounts, but the rest was just forum posts saying things like, "I remember reading about someone..." without providing the actual citation.
I think the issue got resolved because he was lucky enough to be a nerd which a blog that got picked up by HN/Techmeme etc. and then someone from Google personally fixed the problem.
Most users would have been hosed. It also doesn't help that Google has no "real" customer support other than forums. As a user it would be extremely uncomfortable to lose your Google life and have no phone number to call.
At least you can call Microsoft. Whether they can do anything about it is a different story but it at least will escalate easier, or at least I would imagine
They do? I was able to send myself several test messages containing this link.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-live/code-of-cond...
And there's the whole Skype brouhaha.
Microsoft have an edge over Google in that they aren't perceived to be as morally bankrupt, when it comes to privacy and protecting their users (because they earn their money elsewhere), but with the Skype criticism, that may be subject to change. It's a nice flank of attack to use against Google, though, and the video ad in the submission hits all the right notes.
Lol, kids these days, not around during the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s.
Hahahaha what
1. They haven't been around as long and so haven't had to decide how far they'll go when the next big thing comes along.
2. I think they "get" trust, and realise their entire business depends on it. Facebook... not so much. Their continued retraction of new services show that trust isn't even an afterthought.
This is a terribly odd statement. Microsoft has shown, time and time again, that they can shaft their customers because many of them have, or at least had, few alternatives. Google might make a lot of its money on advertising, but it wouldn't make a penny if it didn't have the trust and respect of its customers.
It feels like a weekend hackathon project not a commercial enterprise.
New Outlook (wtf): https://bay002.mail.live.com/default.aspx
Gmail (better, could be cleaner): https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox
are you sure you're using the new outlook.com account and not an old hotmail/live one? if you have a password manager with autologin you might have gotten signed into a wrong account
Yeah, verified: here is a copy/paste from the message.
From: Hotmail Team <member_services@live.com>
To: <saurik@outlook.com>
Subject: Getting started with Hotmail
Date: Tue 7/31/12 9:51 AMI use Yahoo Mail online for most of my personal stuff. Out of all the online email offerings out there I have found it to be the most "polished" (if I can use that term) and outlook-like. I tried Gmail a couple of years back and just didn't do it for me. As an example, the lack of a real time preview pane was a huge deal breaker for me. Both Outlook and Yahoo Mail have this. Maybe Gmail has this now, I don't know.
The other thing about Gmail that scared the crap out of me was to watch as one of our clients had their Gmail account evaporate because their AdSense account got shut down. They were new to the platform and made a couple of dumb and innocent mistakes off the line. Google bots summarily shut-down the account with no recourse or anyone to contact. As their account got suspended so went Gmail. I'll let you venture a guess as to whether or not these people are using any Google products now.
Here's a feature I wish email clients would implement: Tabbed accounts.
I run more than one company and regularly monitor a dozen email accounts. Outlook and Yahoo Mail allow you to setup rules to deliver email from specific accounts into designated folders. With Outlook you can also choose to store the email in separate files. That's all well and fine, but the whole thing has the risk of becoming cluttered and difficult to use after a while.
There's an Outlook hack that allows you to launch multiple Outlook instances. This works very well as I can launch one instance that opens the email addresses corresponding to one business and another instance with a separate business. Having multiple monitors makes this even handier.
What would be even better is if I could do the same thing with tabs. I want one tab per business --or a user-designated category. Each tab would receive and send email from one or many email addresses. They would all be independent while having relevant sharing capabilities (copy and past, drag and drop, etc.).
It's about context switching.
With something like that I could have a single email client handle all of my business email as well as personal within one application window. That would be slick.
I have two pinned tabs always open in Chrome - one for personal, one for business emails. Works incredibly well for me.
What I find interesting is that its even a product. I know that sounds weird but bear with me for a moment.
Mail (the service) has changed hardly at all for a decade. You send an email, may be you attach a few files, you get the email. The biggest change was that you could send text that had been formatted with HTML so that it looked 'better' (not everyone agrees with this) than plain, monospaced text.
Its a bitch to monetize in any way except direct payment, and yet the Eudora's and other mail clients of the world have faded from memory.
Given the collective memory, is it time for mail as a service? You know you pay $12/year or something and it just works. Nobody futzes with the UI, the amount of space you get/use is entirely a function of what you're willing to pay.
The question I'm asking is this, "Have we collectively come to understand the intrinsic value of email?" If so is there a utility service business plan that makes sense now? I could certainly see how you might structure such a business.
chrome --app=https://facebook.com --user-data-dir=/home/jewel/.profiles/facebook
The other thing I do is use a different google account for each of their services, so a policy violation in one won't shut off the service in another. For example, I have calendar@mydomain.com for google calendar, plus@mydomain.com for google plus, youtube@mydomain.com for youtube.
Good point about the Google account bans, though. See also: Skydrive.
Bad point about mixing personal and business email in one window, though. That's a disaster waiting to happen.
No, the idea is to have tabs that you can organize based on the context you need. One tab would be personal. Another might emails from one business. The other might be setup for the other.
I wear a couple of hats, so, for example, I'd love to have a tab that's just "Business #1 Engineering" and a separate tab that's "Business #1 Business" and keep those "personalities" separate. My engineering email address is different from my business email address as I've found that this keeps the individual mailboxes cleaner overall. Just my preference. Doesn't make it right. I also have hundreds or rules and lots of VBA code in Outlook making sense out of the whole mess.
I wouldn't have been able to do what I've been doing over the last fifteen years without the level of programming and manipulation available in Outlook.
---
Here's hoping that other email clients learn well from Sparrow's success.
Any unpaid account has a chance of being shut down without recourse. I haven't heard of this happening with any Google Apps accounts though (especially paid ones). Anyone else?
RUNNING MULTIPLE INSTANCES OF OUTLOOK
Download and install "ExtraOutlook.exe" from:
http://www.hammerofgod.com/download/ExtraOutlook.zip
Copy the executable to the folder where outlook lives. In the current case that means:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\
To create and manage profiles in Vista 64 go to
Control Panel > View 32-bit Control Panel Items > Mail > Show Profiles
Profile 1:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\ExtraOutlook.exe" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\OUTLOOK.EXE" /profile "Profile 1"
Profile 2:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\ExtraOutlook.exe" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\OUTLOOK.EXE" /profile "Profile 2"
I go through the extra effort of assigning a different icon to each account and placing them on the quick-launch toolbar. I've been doing this for about two years and it works great. No issues whatsoever.
I can't believe MS doesn't implement MDI in Outlook so that one can do this using tabs and a single instance.
Well, it failed my test. Sorry. I never trust my emails to small hard to remember passwords. I rather trust them to very large easy to remember/type passwords. Like horses-functional-pickles
Also their capcha, I cannot figure out it, i won't spend more than 2 minutes on capcha
They also make it insanely difficult to use a password manager, as the login page URL redirects from outlook.com to some randomness that's 205 characters long.
I mean, unless Microsoft explicitly prompt them with a reminder of sorts, when they flip the switch on a sane password length, but what are the odds of that happening?
That is generous. I dont like to spend more than 30 seconds max on capchas.
It's like they pursued test-driven development on the captcha but the only test was whether bots couldn't pass, not whether humans could pass it.
After only three attempts, it told me "You've reached the limit for number of attempts. These limits help us protect against spam from automated programs. You can try again later."
The audio captcha was so terrible that I recorded it to share with others. Oddly enough, when I played back my recording of it, it was easier to understand the "valid" words. That is very curious.
Oddly enough, I just reloaded the captcha page and it dropped me into an account and just won't let me send anything until I pass a captcha. I try every once in a while but any time I solve the captcha it gives me the rate-limiting message.
On a side note, they allowed me to sign in with my passport which does not have a Microsoft-provided e-mail address. The interface seems to presume it's responsible for my other e-mail address.
Only one thing: Microsoft, I know its really chiq and en-vogue nowadays to have some element with position:fixed; on every page, but please: don't!
There is no reason whatsoever why I would want to see all the time the titlebar. I mean, why would I want to see it? I know I am using Outlook! I know who I am! And it's not very often that I want to access the settings!
But, I guess, there is no way around it, position:fixed; is just soooo "modern".
It's a pain maintaining override scripts for multiple sites, but pick your battles and you can make some positive improvements.
[1] at 55 seconds in the video. This link starts a couple seconds before that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDI6Itn7soQ#t=53
There's a ton of ways you can specify your own CSS for a website, depending on what browser you're using.
Not only is it getting harder and harder to read emails on a Netbook screen (there is almost no space left for the actual message), it is also getting painfully slow.
Gmail now loads and runs to much Javascript that my poor little Netbook can't even scroll smoothly anymore.
After playing with Outlook.com a bit, it seems much faster than Gmail.
Since Marissa Mayer is now at Yahoo, I expect a much improved Y!Mail soon.
Depending on where you are, the options on the toolbar change, and are really helpful.
I really like it.
I also agree with the post below re: branding. I went to "Help" to see what they had and it took me to a windows.com page saying "This page doesn't exist" followed by "Hotmail Help". Nice.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/06/14/building-the-m...
Kudos to the Outlook design team for the clean UI that doesn't take long to get used to and is intuitive once you are used to it.
You can also tab between "to:", "subject" and "body" parts of the email by just using tab (tab twice when finished entering email addresses).
I much prefer using a keyboard than a mouse.
But, I do like the Metro UI, though. Clean!
Disclosure: I work at MS, but not on this product and have no special insight into their workings.
I think the fact that few developers enjoy using Outlook is causing you to overgeneralize. Most people who don't care about things like whether their email is in mbox format, or who don't want to learn how to use Mutt or notmuch, find Outlook surprisingly easy to use and powerful.
I poked around on outlook.com, and I don't see anything particularly innovative, other than it looks and works nearly exactly like Outlook 2013. But I wouldn't assume its lack of anything novel dooms it to obscurity, either. Outlook, unlike Notes, is a positive brand-name in some circles. I wouldn't be surprised to see this get a relatively large amount of traction right off the bat.
I didn't realize this myself, either, until I started working at an employer that uses the Google Apps stack for all things corporate.
One complaint I heard was the lack of sorting features (sorting your inbox by subject, sender, etc.) which also drives me nuts when I use Gmail on my personal account.
The same way having a desk is expected.
I kind of have a problem with their design though. I guess it is all part of the Metro initiative which can look nice in some of their efforts (mobile) .. but here it just shouts at me something to the effect of: "I'm so new and cool and fresh that I don't need subtlety or pleasant earthy colors. Mail, People, Calendar, SKYDRIVE.. I dare you to click EVERYTHING!" Maybe I'm getting too old in my 30th year of life but that intimidates me more than it excites me.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">That sent a shiver down my spine. Please, Google, don't rewrite gmail. Continue improving incrementally. Thanks.
Wow. Very interesting. At first glance, the interface looks very mobile friendly and also very simple.
I'm incredibly impressed. The only feedback I would give is that the buttons in the top bar could stand out a bit - maybe a different shade of blue or a slight border. It wasn't immediately clear to me where 'send' was.
The ads are a bit more obtrusive than Google Mail ads, though I think that would just take a bit of getting used to.
I'm impressed as fuck, though. I can't explain how impressed I am.
1. Enter details with a short, simple email address. Submit the form;
2. Sign up fails. I provided an alternative email address but not a phone number; apparently both are required for password recovery (why?), despite there being no indication both fields are required. Grudgingly give up phone number and try again;
3. Sign up fails. Apparently my phone number isn't valid, and I have to delete the first digit (0 in the UK, to be replaced by +44) for the form to accept it. Try again;
4. Sign up fails. For some reason the form has kept all my other details but has decided to lose the month and year of my DOB. Re-enter those details and try again;
5. Sign up fails. I was presented with the same CAPTCHA for the first three attempts but apparently it's now changed; Enter new CAPTCHA and try again;
5. Sign up fails. Finally, the form tells me the short, simple email address I chose is taken. There was no indication when I entered the address;
6. Give up and forget about it.
As I think about it, Office was sortof like the original mashup (but applied to the desktop space). When they started integrating everything into Office (including the OS and the web browser) it started falling apart.
What I see with outlook.com is another mashup concept, but this time it is a very natural fit: the web is basically meant for this sort of thing.
And another thing: I use Skype. I am typing this on a mac, but I do have that one MS-owned property installed (Skype). This could be a vector that MS uses towards greater mindshare.
[1] https://www.facebook.com/#!/media/set/?set=a.101510045341137...
Interestingly enough, the ads created by Microsoft touting Outlook.com don't have any of these problems the blogpost associates with Microsoft ads. In fact, the ads excites me and compels me to at least try the product.
That's going to confuse non-technical users. There's no indication that any replies are going to go right where it's supposed to, Google Apps...
Plus, when attempting to send, I get a captcha. Filling it out (correctly) gives me a "too many attempts" warning.
"Unsatisfactory" would be the word I'd use for the new outlook.com. Slow, terrible UI and UX, and I see no improvements on the junkmail filter at all.
I really would like to see MSFT getting better at this (or at anything, really; they are the underdog in so many categories of tech now). But they are not. I'm a Mac/Apple fan by choice. But I like competition in the market. And I do wish MSFT the best in getting it right (or somewhat right). But this is so far out there that I just don't know what they are thinking. To use the words "We think the time is right to reimagine email" is simply disingenuous -- the site didn't reimagine anything -- it looked like a re-skinned old hotmail to me in every aspect.
I will check it out again in a couple of months. Maybe they'll have time to fix enough problems that I'll change my mind then. But until that point, thumbs down.
My live id is a Gmail address. Went to Outlook.com, wanted to register but the form said 'login if you have a live id'. Did that, ended up on a very ugly hotmail-kind-of site.
Hrmpf. Went back to Outlook.com, but logged in now: The web interface lets me compose and send mails as me@gmail?
Google has been probably quite successful in monetizing their web mail. It can be sometimes annoying for users, but I believe in the long run it is better to be using a system that has a viable business model behind it.
One thing where Microsoft could compete would be support for third party apps. I think there could be some possibilities for innovation on this area. Something that would strike a balance between security and flexibility. With GMail the options seem to be either gadgets (pretty limited) or giving full IMAP access to 3rd party apps (too much power).
https://dub002.mail.live.com/default.aspx?id=64855&owa=1...
Doesn't look like outlook.com to me.
When e-mail is one tab among 12 in my browser, I find this kind of focus and simplicity to be a real advantage.
The UX for this is a nightmare:
- It's not clear that the Subject is editable (doesn't look like it's in a text box nor does the label look like a placeholder).
- Clicking on BCC opens a CC box with a drop-down that covers the BCC field.
- The Send button looks like a main navigation menu, where I'd expect clicking on it would navigate away from the page (and not send the email)
- The Rich text buttons look part of the content, a light shade of grey wouldn't add any pixels but would provide separation between function and content
Back to gmail....
Just logged in to my @live.com account - 4814 messages in my Inbox, 17 in my Spam folder.
Guess how many in my Inbox are legit messages? None.
If you have a Live account that has an external e-mail address Microsoft allows you to login here, without any additional authentication credentials, and actually will send e-mails using the account's original address. In my case this was my Gmail address.
Overall the requirement of Silverlight is a little annoying, but the same as usual for Microsoft. The UI itself doesn't look bad, and I actually prefer it to generic Gmail theme.
EDIT: More of the same, apparently: http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-outlook/archive/2012/07/...
I go for the captcha. 20 tries, no luck. Let's try audio. Impossible.
[EDIT] And now, a really funny one I just got :
We've noticed some unusual activity in your Outlook account. To help protect you and
everyone else, we've temporarily blocked your account.
To unblock it, please {0}.
The second thing I see is, wow, this looks really nice.
But, that was the second thing, first I felt like I was at Best Buy. I don't have a TV and I don't even want a TV, go away!
When I'm in an email, there will be one to several contextual ads (sometimes hilariously mistargeted) on the right.
Do you not see these?
If MS wants to start a new email service, the Outlook name is a sure guarantee that we won't want to use it.
They do offer Exchange Activesync for mobiles, but without EWS or IMAP you can't really complete the circle and give customers a decent email experience.
This is very interesting to see them converge the brands.
The problem with M$ products of course, which makes us all very skeptical is how well it actually works.
-- Olav
Clean design though. I'm sure it actually sends email too. I'll try again later.
EDIT: I tried visiting outlook.com again a few minutes later and, hey, it looks like I have an account! Hope I didn’t miss any important welcome steps (like, I never got to pick an outlook.com email address)
EDIT: ah, but I get the captcha again when I try to do certain things. Still haven't solved it — can’t tell if I’ve been rate limited. I’m definitely human :)
It's nice to be able to grab sync@outlook.com too.
That causes other servers to think that email sendt from outlook.com is spam....
A complete waste of time apart from the fanboys who can gloat at the Window 8 look... ;-)
Your password can't be longer than 16 characters.
... we provide an inbox with ... rock solid account protection
powered by your Microsoft account ...
Yet what do I see upon logging in to Outlook.com? Crappy ads.
I'll take creepy (relevant) over crappy, thanks.
The password requirement description only shows '8-character minimum; case sensitive'.
Disappointing. And apparently no 2-factor authentication either … :(
Also, there's an issue displaying correctly in Chrome on a Mac. I suppose that's not MS's favourite software/hardware combo though.
Doesn't sound like a "reimagination". But the visuals are nice
I thought microsoft made corporate-friendly products. Must try harder!
I am wondering what this refers to :)
Nice work again, Microsoft. Its almost sort of a trend now (Surface, Azure VMs) - has Microsoft got its act together?
Cancel :)
Sigh ...