Macworld: Microsoft makes a U-turn, keeps Hotmail ...

Notes from a long time web emailer:

I've kept my Hotmail account for years, because I have so many subscription and business relation accounts tied to it. I switched to GMail for personal mail from its release, after trying Yahoo as well (which I keep for bulletins from a Yahoo group or two, and for the neat free calendar-will-text-your-cell-phone appointment reminders).

By any objective measure Hotmail gets by far the most spam -- in the InBox -- and nothing has changed through all the iterations of the betas in this regard.

The "classic" interface did undergo its first ever real improvement recently to be fair -- and now actually shows the whole address of the sender and the whole subject. Imagine that! And it only took 10 years! They're smokin' up there now... ...but this long overdue improvement has endeared old HM a bit to me, and at least it meets my needs for checking shipping confirmations, etc. -- as long as I remain aware of the caveat below that is....

Hotmail also gets many more false negatives, i.e., despite all my "report and delete" clicking, it can't seem to learn that I'm too dense to want to save 85% on ink cartridges that would void my printer warranty and fade in ten minutes, like the erections all the Viagra offers would bring me, but it DOES tag incoming emails from new subs or invoices, etc. as spam! So I have to manually check my junk mail box daily.

The funniest thing H.Mail does though, is tag certain eMails from Microsoft at the highest warning level with a pink shield indicating the mail may be dangerous and malicious. ROFL!

I do get lots of spam on Gmail -- but it's 99.5% all in the spam filter box -- and out of thousands of messages, maybe I've had one false negative in a year. So basically, I can just forget about checking it.

And G gets smarter every day -- with no fanfare cool new features appear regularly. The search feature is superb, contacts work like they should, the labels are fast, easy to create and apply as is making groups, and sending eMail as if it came from any of your other accounts.

For those who dig in there's really no comparison -- though the threads interface may throw some at first and messages that changed topic without changing subject may be buried where you HAVE to search for 'em.

One last reason for multiple accounts from different email providers: with a tabbed browser I can have my G, Hot and Yahoo mail, i.e all my mail segregated by type and all open at once. If I had three GMail accounts I'd have to run FireFox, Safari and Opera at once to accomplish the same feat and with much window switching.

Feb 9, 2007 11:40 AM

Microsoft makes a U-turn, keeps Hotmail name

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