Active View, Microsoft’s typically obtuse label, is actually a very cool function. For example, your friend sends you an e-mail about the latest YouTube video showing accidental damage to a man’s nether region. Instead of getting just a link to the video, you see a thumbnail of the pole-vaulting disaster and can play the video in a popup window right in your inbox. Besides the YouTube videos, the system also supports Hulu videos.
Active View also works with pictures. If a friend attaches a few shots from their vacation, you’ll see thumbnails of the pictures in the email. You can scroll through the thumbnails in the same window or click on them and see a slideshow in a pop-up window.
Your friends don’t have to use Hotmail for Active View to work on your end, but your system must have Microsoft’s Silverlight installed.
Edit Attachments in Office Online
When someone sends you a document in Word, Excel or Powerpoint, Hotmail will give you the option of opening it in the Office online apps. You can choose to edit the document online, in which case Hotmail will automatically upload it to Skydrive, the Microsoft cloud storage site. Then you can respond with a link to the online document containing your changes.
Not surprisingly, Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, is heavily integrated with Hotmail. What is surprising, is the seamless way the two can interact. When you’re writing a message in Hotmail, you can choose to insert information from Bing – images, videos, movie times and information, map data and webpage info. A side panel pops up that lets you search Bing for what you’re looking for. Find it and you can simply click Insert below the item. Hotmail will place the image, map or other data directly into your message, along with a link that lets you go to the search result in Bing.
I don’t know if the sum of all these improvements will be enough to move me out of Gmail, but they’re clearly the product of some innovative thinking that should advance the online e-mail world.
Exchange support
Hotmail has a decent version for mobile browsers, but Microsoft is also enabling access through Exchange ActiveSync, letting you use your phone’s own e-mail, contact, and calendar apps as long as the handset supports Exchange.
New Inbox Views
These automatically generated filters help you find what really interests you in your inbox. The most useful is probably the “From contacts” view, which shows only emails from people in your contact list. This does a pretty good job of isolating only the messages you really need to respond to, especially if you have all the people you work with regularly in your contacts list.
Another filter shows all your updates from social networks like Twitter and Facebook, while a third finds mail like newsletters and email blasts to large groups. And there are views that find all e-mails with photos or office documents attached or that contain shipping updates.
Of course, you can create some of these filters yourself in a service like Gmail, but lots of people won’t go through the hassle. Microsoft has done a good job of recognizing what filters many people would want and building them automatically.
Sweeping Out the Junk
These days, most true spam (such as Viagra ads and porn come-ons) gets caught before it ever gets to your inbox. But you still get semi-spam messages: newsletters that you signed up for, but then found weren’t that useful or coupons from a store you no longer shop with. With a little work, you could figure out how to unsubscribe, but Hotmail’s Sweep feature makes evicting them from your inbox much easier.
You can select messages in your inbox, then move or delete them en masse-and choose to automatically apply the same action to future messages from the senders in question. It’s a sort of hybrid of bulk actions and rules, and a clever tool for keeping your inbox tidy.
With the continuous growth of Gmail, the “giant” Microsoft has decided to upgrade its Hotmail service to compete with rivals.
Hotmail is the first email service in the world. The service was launched in 1996 with a friendly interface, stable and high-reliability so then Hotmail has attracted a large number of users in the world. In 1997, the giant software company – Microsoft bought this service for $400 million. Since then, Hotmail become the most popular email service in the world with the backing of Microsoft.
However, Google’s Gmail has recently emerged and growing rapidly with much more prominent innovations. Hotmail still has a huge number of user but no one sure whether service might be overcome or not by Gmail because Hotmail does not seem to have any innovations for many years.
Therefore, Microsoft has decided to launch an update to the online mail service this summer, it’ll include some features that are actually innovative, well-thought-out and useful.
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