So basically the new Hotmail is mostly the same as the old Hotmail, but: 1) It offers you some of the features GMail already has, like the conversation view.

So basically the new Hotmail is mostly the same as the old Hotmail, but: 1) It offers you some of the features GMail already has, like the conversation view. 2) It does not offer you some of the features GMail does, such as labels. By the way, you can tell that the author doesn't really understand labels, because he claims that the archiving is the same as deleting. 3) It offers you some dubious features that GMail does not have. Preview, for example, is something I find utterly useless. If I can't glean what the e-mail is about from either the subject or the short text preview GMail offers, then it can generally wait for me to open it. However, I'm aware that this is just my personal preference. What really flabbergasted me was the "Sweep" feature. I don't know whether the author described it well, but if he did, then I don't understand why he thinks it's so great. Maybe I'm a pessimist, but I think it's naive to trust in software's ability to guess what your criteria is for deleting future messages "like" the ones you marked. 4) It offers some preconfigured filters and views that GMail doesn't. Some of these things sound really useful, especially filtering by senders from your contact list. Here's one of the things the new Hotmail doesn't seem to have, that I consider GMail's killer feature (apart from the whole awesome labels+filters paradigm): Labs. I absolutely love multiple inboxes and superstars. Also, the new Google Apps integration with GMail is a huge plus. Finally, let's not forget that GMail's spam filter, in my experience, works better than Hotmail's spam filter ever did. I don't think Hotmail will be giving GMail "a run for its money" anytime soon.