Let’s be honest: For a long time, it was a little embarrassing to use a
Hotmail address. I should know — I’ve been using Hotmail as my primary email since I first got an account in 1999.
I wish I could say that I never looked back, but when I saw all of my friends and professional colleagues touting their
Gmail
addresses in the mid-2000s, I considered switching. Certainly, I
created and maintained a Gmail account, but I decided all those years
ago that I wanted an email that wouldn’t change, so I stuck with
Microsoft’s Hotmail, despite its poor storage capacity and the torrents
of spam.
To anyone without that interest in email permanence, Gmail was an
easy choice. Its clean layout, easy archiving and seemingly endless
storage wooed many digital influencers and their followers. Although
Hotmail always bragged more overall users, everybody in the know had
figured out that Gmail simply outclassed Hotmail in pretty much every
way that mattered.
As time went on,
Microsoft
added new features to Hotmail and caught up with Gmail in many
respects. But the damage was done. Even after Hotmail offered nearly
unlimited storage, much improved spam filtering and useful inbox-cleanup
features, the stigma remained. If you saw the @hotmail.com domain in
someone’s reply-to field, it necessitated a tsk-tsk — or at least a roll
of the eyes. You have to wonder how many resumes were thrown in the
trash at tech companies because the applicant had put a Hotmail address
in their contact info. Gmail won.
Then: Boom.
Last month, Microsoft changed the game, re-launching Hotmail as
Outlook.com, casting aside its tarnished brand and giving the service a major makeover, along with some game-changing new features.
Is it as good as Gmail, though? Where does each service excel, or
fall down? And will the switch to Outlook for web mail finally enable
Microsoft to cast off the stigma of Hotmail? Let’s look closer.
Messages
The absolute basic basics of the two programs — composing messages —
is actually fairly different between the two services. Gmail opens up a
clean message but retains the Gmail template, with your labels and chat
contacts on the side. Outlook, on the other hand, brings you to a
compose page where it’s just you and your email.
The Gmail approach is more versatile. While you’re writing your
message, you can click away at any time and Gmail will automatically
save a draft. Outlook instead simply gives you a warning that you
haven’t
yet saved your draft if you try to leave before hitting send. That
makes saving drafts a two-step process — slightly more inconvenient.
The idea of getting shunted to a dedicated composition page has some
merit. When replying to long email chains, for example, you’ll
inherently see more of the message on your screen.
Outlook doesn’t offer as powerful editing tools as Gmail does,
though. While both programs will let you compose messages in rich or
plain text, Gmail has a Clear Formatting button, which I’ve found
extremely useful whenever I need to copy-and-paste some text into an
email. Outlook.com lacks this feature, although it can do something else
Gmail can’t: setting message priority (although I’ve always found it
more effective to simply put “URGENT” in a subject).
Outlook, however, adds a very nice aesthetic touch to the act of
sending an email. When you hit Send, the message shrinks within the
window for a second, then moves upward slightly (sucked into the “tubes”
of the Internet) right before the app tosses you back to your Inbox.
Winner: Gmail
Social Integration
Google is doing its best to become a heavyweight among social networks, and it shows. Gmail is hard-wired into
Google+,
showing you notifications and your G+ profile pic in the top right at
all times. It’s always been a one-click experience to start IMing with
someone via GChat, or a voice call via GTalk, on the left rail. Finally,
Gmail just integrated Google+ hangouts into Gmail in lieu of the old
video chats.
Still, that’s about as far as it goes. Given the areas they compete in, Google has fairly icy relations with
Twitter and
Facebook, so you won’t see them here. But Outlook.com ties into both of those services in a fairly novel way.
In Outlook, whenever you click on a message from an actual person (as
opposed to a newsletter or notification) you’ll see the latest updates
from that person’s Twitter and Facebook feeds on the side. You can even
Like and retweet posts without ever leaving Outlook.com.
Sure, Gmail will show you Google+ profile information of the person
you’re emailing, but that’s about it. Seemingly, Outlook wins here
except it so far has no integrated way to start a video or voice chat
with someone (regular IMing has always been integrated with Windows Live
Messenger). Microsoft says
Skype will fill this gap, but the feature has yet to appear.
Winner: Draw
Ads
Ads are annoying — unless of course the ad is advertising something
you actually want. To my recollection, I’ve never once clicked on an
email ad (whether text or display), so that either says those ads do a
bad job of doing that, or they’re simply not noticeable enough for it to
matter.
In its Outlook metamorphosis, Hotmail ditched display ads in favor of
text ads along the right side. This made it more like Gmail, although
there are a few differences. For one, the Outlook ads are visible even
when you’re just looking at your Inbox; on Gmail, they only appear when
you have a message open.
More importantly, the ads disappear on Outlook when you select one of
those messages from an actual person, replaced by the social-network
info mentioned above. Gmail shows you ads on all messages.
The third difference is in how you actually interact with the ads. If
you mouseover one on Outlook, an image appears over it. That could be
of interest to advertisers, since it seems to be designed to increase
engagement, although it’s too early to say whether it’s effective.
Finally, although few will take advantage of it, Outlook.com still
offers the old Hotmail Plus service of doing away with the ads entirely
for a yearly fee. You’ll need to switch back to the old Hotmail to sign
up, but once you do you can switch back to Outlook and never see an ad
again. Gmail has no such option.
Winner: Outlook
Security
This one is really no contest. Gmail offers two-factor
authentication, and Outlook.com doesn’t. The word “security” doesn’t
even appear on Outlook’s options page.
When I asked Microsoft why it didn’t offer two-factor authentication
for Outlook, a company spokesperson reminded me the service was
technically still in preview, and that it required strong passwords and
had “good server-side detection.”
The rep also said Microsoft was researching security issues while in
preview so it could find a “strong solution that everyone could use” as
opposed to “just the 1% of users that figure out how to navigate a bunch
of additional setup options.” (More info
in this story.)
So perhaps Outlook’s security will get better in the near future, but
for now, if you want a secure, free web email service, that’s Gmail.
Winner: Gmail
Organizing
For most of Hotmail’s history, superior organizing tools are what it
held highest over Gmail. For anyone thrown by Gmail’s use of “labels,”
Hotmail’s more-familiar folders and its ability to rearrange your inbox
(or any folder) by date, sender, subject or size with a single click
were beacons of normality.
That still holds true with Outlook. Folders remain the primary way to
organize your email, and it also retains Categories, which
automatically classify your incoming messages as “social updates” or
“newsletters,” for example.
Outlook’s tools aren’t just there to satisfy left-brainers, however.
The service also arms you with a few tools that help you keep overloaded
inboxes under control. First it offers a quick way to “Sweep” up all
messages from a sender or senders, deleting (or moving) each and every
one of them.
It also provides an easy way to schedule cleanups — say, deleting all
notifications from Twitter or Facebook every few days, negating the
need to even remember to Sweep. Although Gmail offers a Priority Inbox
feature that comes in handy for putting important messages front and
center, it doesn’t have anything comparable to a scheduled cleanup.
Finally, there’s the simple Preview Pane, a standard feature on
Outlook that you have to enable through the “Labs” tab in your Gmail
settings to enable. While Hotmail/Outlook has borrowed the best features
from Gmail over the years — such as free integration with mobile email
clients and conversation view — I don’t understand why Gmail hasn’t
implemented this feature, which I view as fundamental to any email
client.
Winner: Outlook
Wrapping Up
And so the final score is two points per side — a tie. While
Outlook.com has a lot going for it, and it’s a huge leap forward for
Microsoft just in terms of brand, Gmail is still superior in some key
ways (security being the biggie). But Outlook.com represents a rebirth
of Microsoft’s web mail service, and the company appears to be investing
much more into it with the launch. Perhaps a rematch will yield
different results in a few months.
In any case, the rebranding of Hotmail as Outlook.com has given users
of Gmail and Yahoo Mail a reason to try something new. Even better,
it’s given them an email address they don’t have to be embarrassed
about.
Source:
mashable.com
11:45:00 AM
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