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Hotmail has been synonymous with the Internet for as long as I can remember but despite maintaining over 325 million monthly active users, the end of an era is near. Microsoft has decided to ditch the Hotmail brand in favor of something that doesn’t carry quite the negative stigma: Outlook. Yes, the same Outlook that has been a staple of Office products for years will now be used to brand the free email service.
Windows Live general manager Brian Hall told VentureBeat that Hotmail simply had a bad reputation and that many people didn’t feel comfortable having their name associated with the service. On the other hand, however, Outlook has a much better reputation as mail from Microsoft and thus the new branding was born.
The new Hotmail, er, Outlook will keep many of the features that people are familiar with but the service will have an all-new look. Hall described it as a clean, fresh, modern design and further proclaimed it to be the cleanest email service available today.
Existing Hotmail users can elect to keep the same @hotmail.com extension or convert over to an @outlook.com address but all users will be migrated to the new design regardless of extension.
Microsoft is also integrating Skype into the new Outlook. A video chat button will allow you to initiate a Skype call with a contact even if you don’t have the software installed on your computer.
Upgrade options are available right now should you wish to get the process out of the way. Simply log into your Hotmail account, click Options then select Upgrade to Outlook.com from the drop-down menu. Once this is completed, you can go into your mail settings and create your @outlook.com address by selecting Create a Outlook alias.
User Comments: 35
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learninmypc said:
I have had several hotmail accounts FOREVER and I recently secured a unique @live.com email address. I DO NOT want an @outlook.com address and WILL NOT use it. If I wanted outlook I would use outlook on my computer. I will move all my accounts to g-mail and microsoft can take a great big jump in the lake!If MS takes a big jump in the lake, what OS will you be using then?
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Not bad, but then again I extensively use Outlook as my primary mail client, so to have similar interface for new mail service make sense. Not sure how one of the commentators said 'it looks like gmail' as simply put it doesn't.
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I hate it! AND it wont let me revert back to how it was!! Messenger is no longer incorporated either. Also, why does FaceAche need to be included with everything!! STUPID
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Re. "If MS takes a big jump in the lake, what OS will you be using then?"
Several Linux distros, BSD, Haiku, UNIX, Icaros, OSX, etc. etc. :-)
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learninmypc said:
Why is it I can send myself an email from my outlook.com address to another email address of mine but when I reply, it says
"This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.
Delivery to the following recipients failed.
& it shows my *************@outlook.com
& it goes on to say' Final-Recipient: rfc822;*************@outlook.com
Action: failed
Status: 5.5.0
Diagnostic-Code: smtp;550 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable (-949396564:3735:0)
????
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Agrred, they should put up a nonbloatware version of the email. Why subject everyone to their Win8 box fetish bloat!
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I hate the boxmail look!
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I am totally having issues trying to add my new outlook email.... TO OUTLOOK CLIENT!!!! Really? I'm using Office/Outlook 07 buy seriously? I can't add the Outlook email address to my Outlook?!?!?
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DAOWAce said:
Oh joy, ANOTHER re-design.
How many times has this happened?
I still have some old hotmail accounts (only one I actually use for certain things) with a ton of history in them, so I don't plan to ever get rid of them, but god, constant re-designs are NOT beneficial to your company's services. Microsoft doesn't understand this.
Google did it to Gmail and upset tens of thousands of people and they still haven't offered the old theme again. We're forced to use Stylish that still doesn't get GMail back to the way it was before, but at least it's not as obnoxious.
The more sites do re-designs, the harder they seem to become to use, and the less I end up using them and even forgetting about them entirely (Fileplanet; which I had an annual sub to)
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I hate it. Hate all the columns. Hate the layout. Hate the fonts. Just lost an important email I had flagged. When I tried to print the attachment (clicked the paperclip) it disappeared. Have spent the last hour going thru all my junk/deleted & inbox messages looking for it. Gone. Nowhere to be found. Will start using yahoo for everything now. A pity as I've had hotmail as long as I can remember. Now hate it.
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