4 ms·

Going on a tangent, but hotmail is really good nowadays. My non-serious-mail-from-friends account is on hotmail, and it's as good as gmail, a bit better in some

by Fargren 15y ago

Going on a tangent, but hotmail is really good nowadays. My non-serious-mail-from-friends account is on hotmail, and it's as good as gmail, a bit better in some stuff and a bit worse in others.

robryan 15y ago
Yeah, hotmail just has a bad reputation because it was pretty average for a time, so people look down on others when they give out their @hotmail email address. I use it, mainly because it was what everyone used back when I created in high school. I have a gmail to but at my volume of email never really felt compelled to totally switch over.
ImprovedSilence 15y ago
Perhaps hotmail is fine. but to be honest, coming from the AIM generation, the biggest gmail pull for me is the fact that all my previous aim buddies are now on google chat. You might be able to tell me to move on, but i still love just siting down and doing the old "what are u doing, what are u doing" checking of statuses, that I grew up doing every day in high school and college... yeah FB and twitter took some of that, but I tend to have smaller, tighter circles of friends, and g-chat is still one of the best ways I keep up with close friends (fb and twitter are more "aquantiences" than friends u could say) now scattered all over the globe. And they are all there. game. set. match. google.
- Fargren 15y ago
  Well, I live in Argentina and here the default chat application is MSN. Since MSN from hotmail's page works exactly as good as gtalk from gmail, the reason you us gmail is aprt of the reason I use hotmail.
ctide 15y ago
I still have a hotmail account that I check periodically, and while it may be ok in IE, it's a terrible experience in Chrome. All the AJAX interface is really slow to the point where you can easily end up deleting messages that aren't even the message that you're currently viewing. I have no idea how it is in Firefox, but, I don't care enough about my Hotmail account to bother using a different browser for it.
- Elepsis 15y ago
  Consider giving it another shot (in Chrome, even). Hotmail has gotten a _lot_ faster in the past couple of months.
pyre 15y ago
But from a data portability standpoint: + Your contacts are easily exportable - Non-webmail access: exchange-push protocol for smart phones, POP3 (aka Inbox-only), Outlook/OutlookExpress-only access (using, I presume, private APIs). - If you decide to move your identity off of hotmail, you can't disable spam filtering, which combined with basically POP3-only access means you are forced to login to check you spam folder. At least with Gmail/GoogleApps you can use IMAP to automatically check/sync your spam folder, even though you can't turn off the filtering. The only plus here is that you can dial down the spam filter slightly, which you can't do on Google. - Since access is POP3 only, the only way to export all of your email is to move all of it into your Inbox and pull it down (or alternate between moving a folder in and pulling it down, then sorting it on the other end back into folders).
naner 15y ago
Going on a tangent, but hotmail is really good nowadays. I hope you're joking. Live Mail (which subsumed Hotmail) is atrocious, the interface sucks. Live Mail also doesn't do a good job of catching spam. The only thing worse I've used interface-wise is Yahoo! Mail.
- maigret 15y ago
  If it sucks, can you give the name of five others that don't?
- forgotAgain 15y ago
  WHile part of Live mail the hotmail addresses are still valid. The interface while still not to my liking has improved to a usable level in the past year. To give credit where it's due, the spam filtering has improved dramatically. I've used my hotmail account as a utility email account for at least ten years. I get several hundred spams a week. They are close to 100% in filtering accuracy for me but YMMV. The only problems I've had is that spammy things I've signed up for can be filtered the first time in.
tim_iles 15y ago
Hotmail, despite improvements, is still terrible. There are three (or 4) areas of action links on the page, to ensure that I never remember where the print button or Reply all button is. It regularly junks emails from lists I'm subscribed to, apparently hitting "not junk" is not enough to mark it safe for next time? The login page has a session that can expire - if I haven't logged in within five minutes of opening the login page, I get thrown backwards again for session expiration. Sometimes I consider not bothering attempting to re-log in. Perhaps I've just been spoilt by Gmail.

by Fargren 15y ago

Going on a tangent, but hotmail is really good nowadays. My non-serious-mail-from-friends account is on hotmail, and it's as good as gmail, a bit better in some stuff and a bit worse in others.

robryan 15y ago

Yeah, hotmail just has a bad reputation because it was pretty average for a time, so people look down on others when they give out their @hotmail email address. I use it, mainly because it was what everyone used back when I created in high school. I have a gmail to but at my volume of email never really felt compelled to totally switch over.

ImprovedSilence 15y ago

Perhaps hotmail is fine. but to be honest, coming from the AIM generation, the biggest gmail pull for me is the fact that all my previous aim buddies are now on google chat. You might be able to tell me to move on, but i still love just siting down and doing the old "what are u doing, what are u doing" checking of statuses, that I grew up doing every day in high school and college... yeah FB and twitter took some of that, but I tend to have smaller, tighter circles of friends, and g-chat is still one of the best ways I keep up with close friends (fb and twitter are more "aquantiences" than friends u could say) now scattered all over the globe. And they are all there. game. set. match. google.

Fargren 15y ago
Well, I live in Argentina and here the default chat application is MSN. Since MSN from hotmail's page works exactly as good as gtalk from gmail, the reason you us gmail is aprt of the reason I use hotmail.

ctide 15y ago

I still have a hotmail account that I check periodically, and while it may be ok in IE, it's a terrible experience in Chrome. All the AJAX interface is really slow to the point where you can easily end up deleting messages that aren't even the message that you're currently viewing. I have no idea how it is in Firefox, but, I don't care enough about my Hotmail account to bother using a different browser for it.

Elepsis 15y ago
Consider giving it another shot (in Chrome, even). Hotmail has gotten a _lot_ faster in the past couple of months.

pyre 15y ago

But from a data portability standpoint: + Your contacts are easily exportable - Non-webmail access: exchange-push protocol for smart phones, POP3 (aka Inbox-only), Outlook/OutlookExpress-only access (using, I presume, private APIs). - If you decide to move your identity off of hotmail, you can't disable spam filtering, which combined with basically POP3-only access means you are forced to login to check you spam folder. At least with Gmail/GoogleApps you can use IMAP to automatically check/sync your spam folder, even though you can't turn off the filtering. The only plus here is that you can dial down the spam filter slightly, which you can't do on Google. - Since access is POP3 only, the only way to export all of your email is to move all of it into your Inbox and pull it down (or alternate between moving a folder in and pulling it down, then sorting it on the other end back into folders).

naner 15y ago

Going on a tangent, but hotmail is really good nowadays. I hope you're joking. Live Mail (which subsumed Hotmail) is atrocious, the interface sucks. Live Mail also doesn't do a good job of catching spam. The only thing worse I've used interface-wise is Yahoo! Mail.

maigret 15y ago
If it sucks, can you give the name of five others that don't?
forgotAgain 15y ago
WHile part of Live mail the hotmail addresses are still valid. The interface while still not to my liking has improved to a usable level in the past year. To give credit where it's due, the spam filtering has improved dramatically. I've used my hotmail account as a utility email account for at least ten years. I get several hundred spams a week. They are close to 100% in filtering accuracy for me but YMMV. The only problems I've had is that spammy things I've signed up for can be filtered the first time in.

tim_iles 15y ago

Hotmail, despite improvements, is still terrible. There are three (or 4) areas of action links on the page, to ensure that I never remember where the print button or Reply all button is. It regularly junks emails from lists I'm subscribed to, apparently hitting "not junk" is not enough to mark it safe for next time? The login page has a session that can expire - if I haven't logged in within five minutes of opening the login page, I get thrown backwards again for session expiration. Sometimes I consider not bothering attempting to re-log in. Perhaps I've just been spoilt by Gmail.